Oscar Wilde : a critical study

CAR -WILDE

RITICAL- STUDY -BY

RTHUR-RANSOME

OSCAR WILDE

. */<?;

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME.
J. M. SYNGE

BY P. P. HOWE

HENRIK IBSEN

BY R. ELLIS ROBERTS

EDGAR ALLAN POE
BY ARTHUR RANSOMB

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
BY A. MARTIN FREEMAN

OSCAR WILDE

A CRITICAL STUDY

BY
ARTHUR RANSOME

NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY

MCMXII

BY THE SAME A UTHOR

BOHEMIA IN LONDON (Sketches and Essays), 1907
A HISTORY OF STORY-TELLING, 1909
EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1910
THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN, 1911
ETC.

Copyright reserved in all countries signatory to the
Berne Convention, The copyright of this book in
Russia is the property of the Scorpion Press, Moscow

TO
ROBERT ROSS

NOTE

I WISH to thank Mr. Robert Ross, Wilde's
literary executor, who has helped me in every
possible way, allowed me to read many of the
letters that Wilde addressed to him, and given
much time out of a very busy life to the
verification, from documents in his possession,
of the biographical facts included in my book.
I wish to thank Mr. Walter Ledger for much
interesting information, and for the sight of many
rare editions of Wilde's books that made possible
the correction of several bibliographical errors
into which I had fallen. I wish to thank Mr.
Martin Seeker for putting at my disposal his
collection of late nineteenth-century literature.
I wish to thank an anonymous author for lend-
ing me the proof-sheets of a forthcoming book,
which will contain a full and accurate account
of the legal proceedings for and against Wilde.
Many of those who knew Wilde have helped
me, by letter or in conversation, with valu-
able reminiscence. I would thank, particularly,

9

NOTE

M. Paul Fort, M. Remy de Gourmont, M. Stuart
Merrill, and Mr. Reginald Turner.

The texts of Wilde's books that I have used
throughout are these : Messrs. Methuen's limited
edition of the works, and the five shilling edition
issued by the same firm ; Mr. Charles Carrington's
edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray ; Mr.
A. L. Humphreys' edition of The Soul of Man
under Socialism; Mr. David Nutt's edition of The
Happy Prince and other Tales. To these, as to
the best, and in some cases the only, editions
easily accessible, I must refer my readers. Much
accurate observation is to be found in M. Andre
Gide's " Oscar Wilde," published by the Mercure
de France, and the result of much laborious and
useful research is embodied in Mr. Stuart
Mason's " Bibliography of the Poems of Oscar
Wilde," published by Mr. Grant Richards. Per-
mission to include many quotations has been
granted by Messrs. Methuen and Co., and
Mr. Robert Ross.

10

CONTENTS

FAGE

INTRODUCTORY 13

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY 27

POEMS 36

.ESTHETICISM 59

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 80

INTENTIONS 104

THE THEATRE 130

DISASTER 153

DE PROFUNDIS 157

1897-1900 178

AFTERTHOUGHT 201

Jl

INTRODUCTORY

GILBERT, in ' The Critic as Artist,' complains that
" we are overrun by a set of people who, when
poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house
along with the undertaker, and forget that their
one duty is to behave as mutes. But we won't
talk about them," he continues. " They are the
mere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is
given to one and the ashes to another, but the
soul is out of their reach." That is not a warn-
ing lightly to be disregarded. No stirring up of
dust and ashes is excusable, and none but brutish
minds delight in mud-pies mixed with blood. I
had no body-snatching ambition. Impatient of
such criticism of Wilde as saw a law-court in
The House of Pomegranates, and heard the clink
of handcuffs in the flowing music of Intentions,
I wished, at first, to write a book on Wilde's
work in which no mention of the man or his
tragedy should have a place. I remembered
that he thought Wainewright, the poisoner and

13

OSCAR WILDE

essayist, too lately dead1 to be treated in "that
fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we
owe so many charming studies of the great
criminals of the Italian Renaissance." To-day
it is Wilde who is too near us to be seen with-
out a blurring of perspectives. Some day it will
be possible to write of him with the ecstatic
acquiescence that Nietzsche calls Amor Fati,
as we write of Caesar Borgia sinning in
purple, Cleopatra sinning in gold, and Roberto
Greene hastening his end by drab iniquity
and grey repentance. But not yet. He
only died a dozen years ago. I planned an
artificial ignorance that should throw him to
a distance where his books alone would repre-
sent him.

I was wrong, of course. Such wilful evasion
would have been foolish in a contemporary
critic of Shelley, worse than foolish in a critic of
Wilde. An artist is unable to do everything for
us. He gives us his work as a locked casket.
Sometimes the wards are very simple and all
the world have keys to fit ; sometimes they are
intricate and subtle, and the casket is only to be
opened by a few, though all may taste imper-
fectly the precious essences distilling through
the hinges. Sometimes, when our knowledge
of an artist and of the conditions under which

1 He died in 1852. Wilde wrote in 1888.
14

INTRODUCTORY

he wrote have been entirely forgotten, there are
no keys, and the work of art remains a closed
casket, like much early poetry, of which we can
only say that it is cunningly made and that it
has a secret. Why do we try to pierce the
obscurity that surrounds the life of Shakespeare
if not because an intenser (I might say a more
accurate) enjoyment of his writings may be
given us by a fuller knowledge of the existence
out of which he wrote ? It is for this that we
study the Elizabethan theatre, and print upon
our minds a picture of the projecting stage, the
gallants smoking pipes and straddling their
stools, the flag waving from above the tiled roof.
We would understand his technique, but, still
more, while we lack directer evidence, we would
use these hints about the furniture of his mind's
eye in moments of composition. Writers of
Wordsworth's generation realized, at least sub-
consciously, that a work of art is not independent
of knowledge. They tried to help us by print-
ing at the head of a poem information about the
circumstances of its conception. When a poet
tells us that a sonnet was composed " on West-
minster Bridge," or " suggested by Mr. Westell's
views of the caves, etc., in Yorkshire," he is
trying to ease for us the task of aesthetic repro-
duction to which his poem is a stimulus. There
is a crudity about such obvious assistance, and

15

OSCAR WILDE

it would be quite insufficient without the know-
ledge on which we draw unconsciously as we
read. But the crudity of those pitiable little
scraps of proffered information is not so remark-
able as that of the presumptuous attempt to
read a book as if it had fallen like manna from
heaven, and that of the gross dullness of percep-
tion that can allow a man to demand of a poem
or a picture that it shall itself compel him fully
to understand it. To gain the privilege of a
just appreciation of a man's books (if, indeed,
such an appreciation is possible) we must know
what place they took in his life, and handle the
rough material that dictated even their most
ethereal tissue. In the case of such a writer as
Wilde, whose books are the by-products of a
life more important than they in his own eyes,
it is not only legitimate but necessary for
understanding to look at books and life together
as at a portrait of an artist by himself, and to
read, as well as we may, between the touches of
the brush. It is not that there is profit in trying
to turn works of art into biographical data,
though that may be a fascinating pastime. It is
that biographical data cannot do other than
assist us in our understanding of the works
of art.

In any case, leaving on one side this question,
admittedly subject to debate, it would have

16

INTRODUCTORY

been ridiculous to study the writings alone of
a man who said, not without truth, that he put
his genius into his life, keeping only his talent
for his books. I therefore changed my original
intention, and, while concerned throughout with
Wilde as artist and critic rather than as crim-
inal, read his biographers and talked with his
friends that I might be so far from forgetting
as continually to perceive behind the books
the spectacle of the man, vividly living his
life and filling it as completely as he filled
his works with his strange and brilliant per-
sonality.

It is too easy to talk glibly of the choice
between life and literature. No choice can be
made between them. The whole is greater
than its part, and literature is at once the child
and the stimulus of life, inseparable from it.
But, beside art, life has other activities, all of
which aspire to the self-consciousness that art
makes possible. The artist himself, for all his
gift of tongues, is not blinded by the descending
light to the plastic qualities of the existence
that fires his words and is itself intensified by
his speech. He, too, moves in walled town or
on the green earth, and has a little time in
which to build two memories, one for his
fellows, and another, a secret diary, to carry
with him when he dies. In his life, his books
B 17

OSCAR WILDE

or pictures or brave harmonies of music are but
moments, notes of colour in a composition vital
to himself. And when we speak so carelessly
of a choice between life and literature, we do
not mean a choice. We only compare the
vividness of a man's whole life, as we perceive
it, with that of those portions of it that he spent
in books. Sometimes we wonder which is more
alive. In Wilde's case we compare a row of
volumes, themselves remarkable, with a life that
was the occupation of an agile and vivid per-
sonality for which a cloistered converse with
itself was not enough, a personality that loved
the lights and the bustle, the eyes and ears of
the world, and the applause that does not have
to wait for print.

Wilde was a kind of Wainewright, to whom
his own life was very important. He saw art
as self-expression and life as self-development.
He felt that his life was material on which to
practise his powers of creation, and handled it
and brooded over it like a sculptor planning
to make a dancing figure out of a pellet of clay.
Even after its catastrophe he was still able to
speak of his life as of a work of art, as if he had
seen it from outside. Indeed, to a surprising ex-
tent, he had been a spectator of his own tragedy.
In building his life his strong sense of the pic-
turesque was not without admirable material,

18

INTRODUCTORY

and he was able to face the street with a decora-
tive and entertaining facade, which, unlike those
of the palaces in Genoa, was not contradicted
by dullness within. He made men see him as
something of a dandy among authors, an
amateur of letters in contrast with the pro-
fessional maker of books and plays. If he wrote
books he did not allow people to presume upon
the fact, but retained the status of a gentleman.
At the Court of Queen Joan of Naples he
would have been a rival to Boccaccio, himself
an adventurer. At the Court of James he
would have crossed "Characters" with Sir
Thomas Overbury. In an earlier reign he would
have corresponded in sonnets with Sir Philip
Sidney, played with Euphuism, been very kind
to Jonson at the presentation of a masque, and
never set foot in The Mermaid. Later, Anthony
Hamilton might have been his friend, or with
the Earl of Rochester he might have walked up
Long Acre to belabour the watch without dirty-
ing the fine lace of his sleeves. In no age
would he have been a writer of the study. He
talked and wrote only to show that he could
write. His writings are mostly vindications of
the belief he had in them while still unwritten.
It pleased him to pretend that his plays were
written for wagers.

After making imaginary backgrounds for him,

19

OSCAR WILDE

let us give him his own. This man, who would
perhaps have found a perfect setting for himself
in the Italy of the Renaissance, was born in
1854. Leigh Hunt, De Quincey, and Macaulay
were alive. Wordsworth had only been dead
four years. Tennyson was writing " Maud " and
" The Idylls of the King." Borrow was wander-
ing in wild Wales and finishing " The Romany
Rye." Browning was preparing "Men and
Women" for the press. Dickens was the
novelist of the day, and had half a dozen books
yet to write. Thackeray was busy on " The
Newcomes." Matthew Arnold was publishing
his "Poems." FitzGerald was working under-
ground in the mine from which he was to extract
the roses of Omar. Ruskin had just published
" Stones of Venice," was arranging to buy the
work of a young man called Rossetti, helping
with the Working Men's College, and writing a
pamphlet on the Crystal Palace. William Morris,
younger even than Rossetti, was an under-
graduate at Oxford, rhyming nightly, and ex-
claiming that, if this was poetry, it was very
easy.

It is characteristic of great men that, born
out of their time, they should come to represent
it. Victor Hugo, in 1830, was a young man
irreverently trying to overturn established tradi-
tion. He had to pack a theatre with his friends

20

INTRODUCTORY

to save his play from being hissed. Now, look-
ing back on that time, his enemies seem to have
faded away, tired ghosts, and he to be alone
upon the stage laying about him on backs of
air. So far was the Elizabethan age from
a true appreciation of Shakespeare that Webster
could patronise him with praise of " his happy
and copious industry." Shakespeare was a busy
little dramatist, working away on the fringe of
the great light cast by the effulgent majesty of
Elizabeth. To-day Shakespeare divides with his
queen the honour of naming the years they
lived in. The nineties, the early nineties when
Wilde's talent was in full fruition, seem now,
at least in literature, to be coloured by the per-
sonality of Wilde and the movement foolishly
called Decadent. But in the nineties, when
Wilde was writing, he had a very few silent
friends and a very great number of vociferous
enemies. His books were laughed at, his poetry
parodied, his person not kindly caricatured, and,
even when his plays won popular applause, this
hostility against him was only smothered, not
choked. His disaster ungagged it, and few men
have been sent to perdition with a louder cry
of hounds behind them.

There was relief as well as hostility in the
cry. Wilde had meant a foreign ideal, and one
not too easy to follow. If he were right, then

21

OSCAR WILDE

his detractors were wrong, and there was joy in
the voices of those who taunted, pointing to the
Old Bailey, " that is where the artistic life leads
a man." There was also shown a curious in-
ability to distinguish between the destruction
of a man's body and the extinction of his mind's
produce. When Wilde was sent to prison the
spokesmen of the nineties were pleased to shout,
"We have heard the last of him." To make
sure of that they should have used the fires of
Savonarola as well as the cell of Raleigh. They
should have burnt his books as well as shutting
up the writer. That sentence, so frequently
iterated, that "No more would be heard of
him," showed a remarkable error in valuation
of his powers.

There was surprise in England when Salome
was played in Paris while its author was in
prison. It seemed impossible that a man who
had been sent to gaol for such offences as his
could be an artist honoured out of his own
country. Only after his death, upon the appear-
ance of De Projundis, and translations of his
writings into French, German, Italian, Spanish,
Swedish, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian, did
popular opinion recognize (if it has yet recog-
nized) that the Old Bailey, the public disgrace
and the imprisonment were only circumstances
in Wilde's private tragedy that would have

22

INTRODUCTORY

been terrible even without them, and that they
were no guarantee of the worthlessness of what
he wrote.

So far were Wilde's name and influence
from ending with his personal disaster that
they are daily gathering weight. Whether his
writings are perfectly successful or not, they
altered in some degree the course of literature
in his time, and are still an active power when
the wind has long blown away the dust of news-
paper criticism with which they were received.
It is already clear that Wilde has an historical
importance too easily underestimated. His in-
direct influence is incalculable, for his attitude
in writing gave literature new standards of
valuation, and men are writing under their in-
fluence who would indignantly deny that their
work was in any way dictated by Wilde.

A personality as vivid as his, exercised at once
through books and in direct but perhaps less
intimate social intercourse, cannot suddenly be
wiped away like a picture on a slate. No
man's life was crossed by Wilde's without ex-
periencing a change. Men lived more vividly in
his presence, and talked better than themselves.
No common man lives and dies without altering,
to some extent, the life about him and so the
history of the world. How much wider is their
influence who live their lives like flames, hurry-

23

OSCAR WILDE

ing to death through their own enjoyment and
expenditure alike of their bodies and their
brains. " Pard-like spirits, beautiful and swift "
are sufficiently rare and notable to be ensured
against oblivion.

His personality was stronger than his will.
When, as he often did, he set himself to imita-
tion, he could not prevent himself from leaving
his mark upon the counterfeit. He stole freely,
but often mounted other men's jewels so well
that they are better in his work than in their
own. It is impossible to dismiss even his early
poetry as without significance. He left no
form of literature exactly as he found it. He
brought back to the English stage a spirit of
comedy that had been for many years in mourn-
ing. He wrote a romantic play which necessi-
tated a new manner of production, and may be
considered the starting-point of the revolution
in stage-management that, happily, is still pro-
ceeding. He showed both in practice and theory
the possibilities of creation open to the critic.
He found a new use for dialogue, and brought
to England a new variety of the novel. His
work continually upset accepted canons and
received views. It placed, for example, the
apparently settled question of sincerity in a new
obscurity, and the distinction between decora-
tion and realism in a new light. One of the

24

INTRODUCTORY

tests of novelty and beauty is that they should
be a little out at elbows in an old aesthetic.
Wilde sets the subtlest problems before us, and
I shall not be wasting time in posing them and
showing that his work has at least this quality
of what is beautiful and new, that it is impossible
to apply to it definitions that were sufficient
before it. It will be necessary in considering
his writing, as I hope to do, to digress again and
again from book, or play, or poem into the
abstract regions of speculation. Only so will it
be possible to appreciate this man whose name
was to have disappeared in 1895, whose work is
likely to preserve that name long after oblivion
has swallowed the well-intentioned prophets of
its extinction.

Even so, however carefully I may discuss
alike his work and the abstract and technical
questions that it raises ; however carefully I may
gather evidence of his overflowing richness of
personality, I shall not be able to make a com-
plete and worthy portrait of the man. There
are people, mostly of the generation before my
own (though the youngest of us may come to
it), who make a practice of suggesting our entire
ignorance of a subject by demanding that we
shall define it in a few words. " Say what you
think of him in a sentence." If I could do that,
do you think I should be going to the labour of

25

OSCAR WILDE

writing a book ? One cannot define in a sentence
a man whom it has taken God several millions
of years to make. In a dozen chapters it is no
less impossible. The utmost one can do, and
that only with due humility, is to make an essay
in definition.

26

II

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

"THE necessity of complying with times, and
of sparing persons, is the great impediment of
biography. History may be formed from per-
manent monuments and records ; but Lives can
only be written from personal knowledge, which
is growing every day less, and in a short time is
lost for ever. What is known can seldom be
immediately told ; and when it might be told, it
is no longer known. The delicate features of
the mind, the nice discriminations of character,
and the minute peculiarities of conduct, are soon
obliterated ; and it is surely better that caprice,
obstinacy, frolick, and folly, however they might
delight in the description, should be silently
forgotten, than that, by wanton merriment and
unseasonable detection, a pang should be given
to a widow, a daughter, a brother, or a friend.
As the process of these narratives is now bring-
ing me among my contemporaries, I begin to
feel myself walking upon ashes under which
the fire is not extinguished, and coming to
the time of which it will be proper rather
to say nothing that is false, than all that

27 '

OSCAR WILDE

is true" (Samuel Johnson, in his "Life of
Addison ").

BEFORE proceeding to the main business of the
book, an examination of Wilde's work, I wish
to set before myself and my readers a summary
biography which may hereafter be useful for
our reference. Much of the life of Wilde is
so bound up with his work as to be incapable
of separate treatment ; but, on the other hand,
dates clog a page, and facts do not always enjoy
their just value when dovetailed into criticism.
In this chapter I shall set down the facts 'of
Wilde's parentage and education, up to the time
when it becomes possible and advisable to speak
of his life and his work together. Thencefor-
ward, I shall do little more than note the dates
of events and publications (reserving to myself
the right of repeating them when I find it con-
venient), and make, as it were, a skeleton that
shall gather flesh from the ensuing pages of the
book.

Oscar Fingal OTlahertie Wills Wilde was
born on October 16, 1854, at 21, Westland
Row, Dublin. His father was William Wilde,
knighted in 1864, a celebrated oculist and aurist,
a man of great intellectual activity and uncer-
tain temper, a runner after girls, with a lusty
enjoyment of life, and a delight in falling stars

28

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

and thunderstorms. His mother, whose maiden
name was Elgee, was a clever woman, who, when
very young, writing as " Speranza " in a revolu-
tionary paper, had tried to rouse Irishmen to
the storming of Dublin Castle. She read Latin
and Greek, but was ready to suffer fools for the
sake of social adulation. She was clever enough
to enjoy astonishing the bourgeois, but her clever-
ness seldom carried her further. When Wilde
was born, she was twenty-eight and her husband
thirty-nine. They were people of consideration
in Dublin. His schoolfellows did not have to
ask Wilde who his father was. It is said,
that before Wilde's birth, his mother had hoped
for a girl. He was a second son. His elder
brother, William, became a journalist in London,
and died in 1899. He had a sister, Isola, younger
than himself, who died in childhood. Her death
suggested the poem ' Requiescat.' To him, as
to De Quincey, a sister brought the idea of
mortality. There are exceptions to that fine
rule of Hazlitt's brother: "No young man
believes he shall ever die." De Quincey look-
ing across his sister's death-bed through an open
window on a summer day, and Wilde, thinking
of

" All her bright golden hair

Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust,"
29

OSCAR WILDE

felt the fingers of death before their time. Like
most of Wilde's early melodies, his lament is
sung to a borrowed lyre, but the thing is so
sweet that it seems ungracious to remember its
indebtedness to Hood.1

Both Sir William and Lady Wilde busied
themselves in collecting folk-lore. Wilde in
boyhood travelled with his father to visit ruins
and gather superstitions. His childhood must
have had a plentiful mythology. Wilde and
his brother were not excluded from the extrava-
gant conversations of their mother's salon. Any
precocity they showed was encouraged, if only
by that curious atmosphere of agile cleverness.
There are no valuable anecdotes of his child-
hood, but it is said that his mother always
thought that Oscar was less brilliant than her
elder son.

When he was eleven he was sent to the
Portora Royal School at Enniskillen, where he
behaved well, did not particularly distinguish
himself, did not play games, read a great deal,
and was very bad at mathematics. In the holi-
days he travelled with his mother in France.
Leaving Portora in 1873, he went with a
scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, where,

1 ' ' Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care ;
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young, and so fair ! "

30

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

in 1874, he won the Berkeley Gold Medal for
Greek. In the same year he left Dublin for
Oxford, matriculating at Magdalen and taking
a scholarship. In 1876 he took a First Class in
Classical Moderations, always a sufficient proof
of sound learning, and, in 1878, he took a First
Class in Literae Humaniores. In 1877 he tra-
velled in Italy and went to Greece with Professor
Mahaffy. This experience had great influence
on his attitude towards art, filled the classical
dictionary with life, and made the figures of
mythology so luminous that he was tempted
to overwork them. In 1878 he read the
Newdigate Prize Poem in the Sheldonian
Theatre.

On leaving Oxford he brought to London
a small income, a determination to conquer the
town, and a reputation as a talker. He took
rooms in the Adelphi. He adopted a fantastic
costume to emphasize his personality, and, per-
haps to excuse it, spoke of the ugliness of
modern dress. In three years he had won the
recognition of Punch, which, thenceforward,
caricatured him several times a month.

In 1881 he published his first book, a volume
of poems, discussed in the next chapter. Five
editions of it were immediately sold. His cos-
tume and identification with the aesthetic move-
ment of that time determined his selection as a

31

OSCAR WILDE

lecturer in America. The promoters of his tour
there were, however, anxious to help not the
aesthetic movement but the success of a play
that laughed at it. He went to America in
1882, and again in 1883, on the latter occasion
to see the production of Vera. On his return
from the first visit he went to Paris, where
he finished The Duchess of Padua, which
was not published till 1908. In 1891 it was
produced in New York, when twenty copies
were printed for the actors and for private cir-
culation. It is likely that in 1883, while in
Paris, he began The Sphinx, upon which he
worked at various periods before its publication
in 1894.

Returning to England, he took rooms in
Charles Street, Haymarket, and lectured in the
provinces. In 1884 he married Constance Mary
Lloyd, who brought him enough money to en-
able him to take No. 16 Tite Street, Chelsea,
which was his home until 1895. He wrote for
a number of periodical newspapers, and, for two
years, edited The Woman's World.

In 1885 'The Truth of Masks' appeared
as ' Shakespeare and Stage Costume ' in The
Nineteenth Century. In 1886 he began that
course of conduct that was to lead to his
downfall in 1895. In 1887 he published
' Lord Arthur Savile's Crime,' « The Canterville

32

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

Ghost,' 'The Sphinx without a Secret,' and
'The Model Millionaire,' which were issued
together in 1891. In 1888 he published The
Happy Prince and other Tales. In 1889 ' The
Portrait of Mr. W. H.' appeared in Black-
wood's Magazine. 'Pen, Pencil and Poison'
appeared in The Fortnightly Review in 1889,
'The Decay of Lying' in The Nineteenth
Century in the same year, and ' The Critic
as Artist ' in The Nineteenth Century in 1890.
A House of Pomegranates and Intentions,
in which these three essays were reprinted
with ' The Truth of Masks,' were published in
1891. In the same year 'The Soul of Man
under Socialism' appeared in The Fortnightly
Review. The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared
in Lippincott's Magazine in 1890. The Pre-
face was published separately in The Fort-
nightly Review in 1891. He added several
chapters, and The Portrait of Dorian Gray was
published in book form in 1891. Much of his time
was spent in Paris, and there, before the end of
the year, he wrote Salome. In 1892 that play
was prohibited by the Censor when Madame
Sarah Bernhardt had begun to rehearse it for
production at the Palace Theatre. It was first
produced in Paris, at the Theatre de L'CEuvre,
in 1896. Lady Winder mere's Fan was produced
on February 20, 1892, by Mr. George Alexander
c 33

OSCAR WILDE

at the St. James's Theatre. A Woman of No
Importance was produced on April 19, 1893,
by Mr. H. Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket
Theatre, where, on January 3, 1895, he pro-
duced An Ideal Husband. On February 14,
1895, Mr. George Alexander produced The
Importance of Being Earnest at the St.
James's.

With the production of these plays Wilde
became not only a caricatured celebrity but a
popular success. He lived extravagantly. In
1895 the applause was turned to execration,
when he lost in a prosecution for criminal libel
that he brought against the Marquis of Queens-
berry, and was himself arrested on a more serious
charge. The jury disagreed, and he was released
on bail, perhaps in the hope that he would leave
the country. He waited the re-trial, was con-
victed, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment
with hard labour, which sentence he served.
Towards the end of his time in prison he wrote
the letter from which De Profundis (published
in 1905) is extracted. After his release he went
to Berneval-sur-mer, near Dieppe, where he began
The Ballad of Beading Gaol, which he revised
in Naples and Paris, and published pseudony-
mously in 1898. He also wrote two letters on
prison abuses, which were published in The
Daily Chronicle on May 28, 1897, and March

34

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

24, 1898. He lived in Italy, Switzerland and
France. He died in Paris on November 30,
1900. He was buried on December 3 in the
Bagneux Cemetery. On July 20, 1909, his
remains were moved to Pere Lachaise.

35

Ill

POEMS

IT is a relief to turn from a list of biblio-
graphical and biographical dates to the May-
day colouring of a young man's first book ;
to forget for a moment the suffering that is
nearly twenty years ahead, and to think
of " undergraduate days at Oxford ; days of
lyrical ardour and of studious sonnet-writing ;
days when one loved the exquisite intricacy and
musical repetitions of the ballade, and the
villanelle with its linked long-drawn echoes
and its curious completeness ; days when one
solemnly sought to discover the proper temper
in which a triolet should be written ; delightful
days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far
more rhyme than reason." It is too easy to
forget this note in Wilde's personality, that he
sounded again and again, and that was not
cracked even by the terrible experiences whose
symbol was imprisonment. To the end of his
life Wilde retained the enthusiasm, the power
of self-abandon to a moment of emotion, the
delight in difficult beauty, in accomplished love-
liness, that made his Oxford years so happy

POEMS

a memory, and give his first book a savour quite
independent of its poetical value.

Ballade and villanelle, rondeau and triolet,
the names of these French forms were enough
to set the key for a young craftsman's reverie.
But the university at that time was full of lively
influences. Walter Pater's " Renaissance " had
not long left the press. Its author, that grave
man, was to be met in his panelled rooms, ready
to advise, to point the way to rare books, and
to talk of the secrets of his art. Pater in those
days was a new classic, the private possession
of those young men who found his books " the
holy writ of beauty." The new classics of the
generation before — Tennyson and Arnold and
Browning — had not yet faded into that false
antiquity that follows swift upon the heels of
popular recognition. The scholar gipsy had not
long been given his place in the mythology
of "Oxford riders blithe," and the trees in
Bagley Wood were still a little tremulous at his
presence. Browning's " The Ring and the Book "
had been published ten years before. Queen
Victoria's approval of Tennyson may have some-
what marred him in the eyes of youthful seekers
after subtlety, but the early poems offered a
pleasant opportunity for discriminating apprecia-
tion. It was not very long since Swinburne
" had set his age on fire by a volume of very

37

OSCAR WILDE

perfect and very poisonous poetry." Morris, the
first edition of whose " Defence of Guenevere,"
though published in 1857, was not exhausted till
thirteen years later, was a master not yet so
widely admired as to deny to his disciples the
delight of a personal and almost daring loyalty.
Rossetti's was a still more powerful influence.

All these factors must be remembered in any
attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere in which
Wilde wrote his early poems. Nor must we
forget that when Wilde entered that atmosphere
as an undergraduate he had an unusual training
behind him. He had known another university,
and carried away from it a gold medal for Greek.
He was an Irishman whose nationality had been
momentarily intensified by his revolutionary
mother and his own name. And, perhaps still
more important, he was a very youthful cos-
mopolitan, had been often abroad, knew a good
deal of French poetry, and had been able to
date one of his earliest poems from that light-
hearted Avignon where the Popes once held
their court, and whence the dancing on the
broken bridge has sent a merry song throughout
the world.

It is curious to see this young lover of Theo-
phile Gautier and old intricate rhyme-forms,
winning the Newdigate Prize for a poem in
decasyllabic couplets on a set subject. Many

38

POEMS

bad and a few good poets have won that prize,
and it constitutes, I suppose, a sort of academic
recognition that a man writes verse. Wilde
was always pleased with recognition, of what-
ever quality, and was, perhaps, induced to
compete on finding himself curiously favoured
by the subject chosen for the year, which hap-
pened to be Ravenua. He had visited Ravenna
on his way to Greece in the previous long vaca-
tion, and so was equipped with memories denied
to his rivals. He saw the city " across the sedge
and mire," when they could only see her on the
map. He knew "the lonely pillar, rising on
the plain" where Gaston de Foix had died.
And, in Italian woods, he had actually watched,
hoping to see and hear

" Some goat-foot Pan make merry minstrelsy
Amid the reeds ! some startled Dryad-maid
In girlish flight ! or lurking in the glade,
The soft brown limbs, the wanton treacherous face
Of woodland god ! "

The wordy piece of rhetoric that was pub-
lished after winning him the prize is enriched
by some pictorial effects that are almost effects
of poetry. But the best that can or need be
said of the whole is, that it is an admirable
prize poem.

Three years later he published his first book.

Poems, bound in white vellum, decorated with
39

OSCAR WILDE

gold, and beautifully printed, contains work
done before and after Ravenna. The most
obvious quality of this work, and that which
is most easily and most often emphasized, is its
richness in imitations. But there is more in
it than that. It is full of variations on other
men's music, but they are variations to which
the personality of the virtuoso has given a cer-
tain uniformity. Wilde played the sedulous
ape with sufficient self-consciousness and suffi-
cient failure to show that he might himself be
somebody. His emulative practice of his art
asks for a closer consideration than that usually
given to it. Let me borrow an admirable phrase
from M. Remy de Gourmont, and say that
a " dissociation of ideas " is necessary in thinking
of imitation. To describe a young poet's work
as derivative is not the same thing as to con-
demn it. All work is derivative more or less,
and to pour indiscriminate contempt on Wilde's
imitations because they are imitations, is to
betray a lamentable ignorance of the history
of poetry. There is no need too seriously to
defend this early work. Wilde's reputation
can stand without or even in spite of it. But
it is worth while to notice that the worst it
suggests is that young poets should be very
careful to be bad critics, since they always do
ill if they imitate the best contemporary models.

40

POEMS

They do better to copy poetasters, whom they
must believe to be Miltons. When Coleridge
admires Bowles, makes forty transcriptions from
his poems for distribution among his friends,
and imitates him as wholeheartedly as he can,
he will but gain in comparison with his original.
There is nothing in the master strong enough
to impose itself upon the pupil. When Keats,
full of admiration, imitates Leigh Hunt, he
is not very heavily impeded in his search for
Keats. But when Wilde blows the horn of
Morris, an echo from that Norseman's lungs
throws out of harmony the notes of his disciple.
When he touches Rossetti's lute his melody is
blurred by the thrum of the strings that the
Italian's fingers have so lately left. In fifty
years' time it will, perhaps, be safe to imitate
Swinburne. It is not so at present.

Even in springing from the ground of prose
into the air of song, it is wise to choose ground
that age has worn or that is not itself remark-
able. When Coleridge reads Purchas —

"In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace,
encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall,
wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfule
Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and
in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of plea-
sure "

and rewrites it —

41

OSCAR WILDE

" In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree :
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery"

he works a true magic, bringing two out of
one, and setting beside Purchas something that
we can independently enjoy. Purchas died so
long ago. He and Coleridge have different
worlds behind them. But when Wilde remem-
bers a passage in his favourite book, written not
a dozen years before, and asks why he should
not make personal to himself the description
of the manifold life of Mona Lisa, that ends,
"all this has been to her but as the sound
of lyres and flutes"; when he prefixes two
verses of explanation to a rhymed elaboration
of that sentence —

" But all this crowded life has been to thee

No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea

That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell "

he only puts it out of drawing. It is impossible
to avoid a comparison, because Pater and Wilde
are so close together, alike in time and feeling.
4 Eleutheria,' a section at the beginning of
42

POEMS

the book, includes a number of discreet sacri-
fices on the altar of Milton. Here Wilde does
much better. Some of these exercises, which
are among the most interesting he wrote, sug-
gest a new view of the morale of imitation.
With Wilde in this mood, imitation (to use one
of those renewals of popular sayings that were
the playthings of his mind), was the sincerest
form of parody. Now parody is a branch of
criticism. The critics of the music-hall stage
are those favourite comedians who imitate their
fellow-actors. Lewis Carroll is a negligible
critic neither of Longfellow nor of Tennyson.
Parody's criticism is too often facile, seeking
applause by the readiest means, holding up to
ridicule rather than to examination faults rather
than excellences, exaggerating tricks of manner
and concerning itself not at all with personality.
Wilde's parodies are at once more valuable and
more sincere. He tries to catch not only the
letter but the spirit, and does indeed present
a clearer view of Milton than is contained in
many academic essays. An accusation of mere
plagiary is made impossible by his openness.
He writes a sonnet on Milton, a sonnet on Louis
Napoleon, and then, matching even the title
of his model, a sonnet on the Massacre of the
Christians in Bulgaria. Let me print the sonnet
" On the Late Massacre in Piedmont " : —

48

OSCAR WILDE

"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter' d saints whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold ;
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not : in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll'd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant ; that from these may grow
An hundredfold, who having learned thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

And then Wilde's : —

" Christ, dost thou live indeed ? or are thy bones
Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre ?
And was thy Rising only dreamed by Her
Whose love of thee for all her sin atones ?
For here the air is horrid with men's groans,
The priests who call upon thy name are slain,
Dost thou not hear the bitter wail of pain
From those whose children lie upon the stones ?
Come down, O Son of God ! incestuous gloom
Curtains the land, and through the starless night
Over thy Cross a Crescent moon I see !
If thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down, O Son of Man ! and show thy might,
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee ! "

This is a very different thing from the blind
plagiary of those who cannot see their own way,
and are themselves surprised to find that they
have stolen. In their case, mistrust of their

44

POEMS

own powers is justifiable. But here, when the
young poet, as an exercise — indeed as more than
an exercise — catches the accent of Milton in
words that deliberately set the doubtful faith
of our day beside the noble assurance of the
Puritans, and show by implication what that
absolute belief meant to Milton, we are in the
presence not of flattery, but of criticism, of
exact appreciation. On the next page is the
sonnet ' Quantum Mutata,' with the lines: —

" Witness the men of Piedmont, chiefest care
Of Cromwell, when with impotent despair
The Pontiff in his painted portico

Trembled before our stern ambassadors " ;

and the suggestion, certainly not personal to
Wilde, but chosen for its fitness to the poet
of whom he is thinking —

"that Luxury

With barren merchandise piles up the gate
Where noble thoughts and deeds should enter by :
Else might we still be Milton's heritors."

If we were to take this view of the character
of Wilde's imitations it would be an easy task
to run through most of the book, showing how
carefully he acknowledges his indebtedness to
Arnold, to Swinburne, to Morris, much as a
creative critic like Walter Pater courteously
sets the name of Pico della Mirandola, or of
Sir Thomas Browne, at the head of a piece

45

OSCAR WILDE

of his own writing of which they have been less
the occasion than the chosen keynote. But
there is no need.

It is more important to the student of Wilde
to notice that the book had a popular success,
and a success in no way due to any praise from
the contemporary critics who, naturally enough,
were unable to consider Poems as the first book
of a great man, could not review it in the light
of his later writings, and attacked it whole-
heartedly, perhaps because they were flattered
by the ease with which they detected its openly-
acknowledged borrowings. Five editions were
sold immediately, and this not very trustworthy
success increased or confirmed Wilde's confi-
dence in himself. The readiness of the public
to throw their opinion in the critics' teeth was
partly due, I think, to precisely those qualities
for which the book was attacked. Much of this
unusual eagerness of ordinary people to buy
poetry, a commodity that they seldom think
worth money, may be attributed to the curiosity
which Wilde had contrived to stimulate by care-
fully calculated eccentricity. But such curiosity
would be more easily satisfied by the sight of
the man than by the reading of his poems. It
is hardly enough to explain the sale of five
editions of a book of verse. I think we may
look for another reason of the book's popularity

46

POEMS

in the fact that Wilde, so far from inventing
a new poetry, happened to summarize in himself
the poetry of his time. He made himself, as
it were, the representative poet of his period,
a middleman between the muses and the public.
People who had heard of Rossetti and Swin-
burne, but never read them, were able to recover
their self-respect by purchasing Wilde.

And this leads us back to the book. All the
defects of this young man's verse became quali-
ties that contributed to its popular success. It
was imitative : it summed up a period of poetry.
It was overweighted with allusion : nothing could
be more poetical in the ears of readers not trained
by an austere Bowyer to a distrust of Pierian
springs, lutes, lyres, Pegasus, and Hippocrene.

"In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming
" Harp ? Harp ? Lyre ? Pen and ink, boy, you mean !
Muse, boy, Muse. Your nurse's daughter, you mean !
Pierian spring ? Oh aye ! the cloister pump, I suppose."
(Coleridge on Bowyer, in the " Biographia Literaria.")

The presence in verse of certain names of
places and persons has come to be taken as
implicit evidence of poetry. Where Venus is,
there must poetry be ; Helicon, Narcissus,
Endymion (after Keats), and a score of others
have become a sort of poetical counters that
careless eyes do not distinguish from the sterling
coin. Wilde makes full use of them, and, per-

47

OSCAR WILDE

haps, trusting to the capital letters to carry
them through, frequently decorates his verse
with names of similar character not yet so hack-
neyed as to be immediately recognized as poetry.
This kind of allusion flatters the reader's learn-
ing. Sometimes he brings colour into his verse
by the use of a reference that must be unintelli-
gible to a large part of his audience, and seems
quite irrelevant to those who take the trouble
to follow it, and have not the good fortune
to hit upon the correct clue. For example,
in « The New Helen ' :-

" Alas, alas, thou wilt not tarry here,

But, like that bird, the servant of the sun,

Who flies before the north wind and the night,
So wilt thou fly our evil land and drear,

Back to the tower of thine old delight,
And the red lips of young Euphorion."

Now that, though not poetry, is a pleasant
piece of colour. But, leaving aside the question
of the bird, the servant of the sun, itself not
easy to resolve, young Euphorion, who has
served Wilde's verse well enough in having
scarlet lips, is more than a little puzzling.
Wilde probably remembers Part II of Goethe's
" Faust." Achilles and Helen are said, as ghosts,
to have had a child called Euphorion, but Goethe
makes him the son of Faust and Helen, named
in the legend Justus Faust. He leaps from earth
when " scarcely called to life," and " out of the

48

POEMS

deep" invites his mother to follow him not to
any " tower of old delight," but to " the gloomy
realm." The reference is wilful, but Euphorion
is a wonderful name.

Sometimes, indeed, the verse gains nothing
from such allusion. For example, in the same
poem : —

" Nay, thou wert hidden in that hollow hill
With one who is forgotten utterly,

That discrowned Queen men call the Erycine."

This is simply learning put in for its own sake
by the young scholar delighting in his knowledge
of antiquity. The line that I have printed in
italics is no more than a riddle whose answer
is Venus, sometimes called Erycina (Erycina
ridens) because she had a temple on Mount Eryx.
Wilde means that Helen was hidden with the
spirit of beauty (Venus) now shamefully neglec-
ted. He delighted in such riddles and disguised
references, and they certainly helped his less
cultured readers to feel that in reading him they
were intimate with more poetry than they had
read. In 'The Burden of Itys,' to take a last
example, he says, addressing the nightingale : —

tf Light-winged and bright-eyed miracle of the wood !

If ever thou didst soothe with melody
One of that little clan, that brotherhood

Which loved the morning-star of Tuscany
More than the perfect sun of Raphael
And is immortal, sing to me! for I too love thee well."
D 49

OSCAR WILDE

Sir Piercie Shafton might choose such a method
of referring to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Indeed, so far does Wilde carry his ingenuity
that we are reminded of the defects of that
school of verse that Johnson called the metaphy-
sical, whose virtues are too generally forgotten.
He hears the wind in the trees as Palsestrina
playing the organ in Santa Maria on Easter Day.
With half an echo of Browning he describes
a pike as " some mitred old bishop in partibus"
and, with a true seventeenth-century conceit,
speaks of the early rose as " that sweet repent-
ance of the thorny briar."

This ready-made or artificial poetry lacked,
however, the firm intellectual substructure that
could have infused into ornament and elabora-
tion the vitalizing breath of unity. Wilde was
uncertain of himself, and, in each one of the
longer poems, rambled on, gathering flowers
that would have seemed better worth having
if he had not had so many of them. Doubtful
of his aim in individual poems, he was doubtful
of his inclinations as a poet. Nothing could
more clearly illustrate this long wavering of his
mind than a list of the poets whom he admired
sufficiently to imitate. I have mentioned Morris,
Swinburne, Arnold, and Rossetti ; but these are
not enough. In swift caprice he rifled a score
of orchards. He very honestly confesses in

50

POEMS

' Amor Intellectualis ' that he had often " trod
the vales of Castaly," sailed the sea " which the
nine Muses hold in empery," and never turned
home unladen.

" Of which despoiled treasures these remain,
Sordello's passion, and the honeyed line

Of young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine

Driving his pampered jades, and more than these

The seven-fold vision of the Florentine,

And grave-browed Milton's solemn harmonies."

Milton, Dante, Marlowe, Keats, and Brown-
ing, with those I have already named, and
others, make up a goodly list of sufferers by
this lighthearted corsair's piracies. He built
with their help a brilliant coloured book, full
of ingenuity, a boy's criticism of the objects of
his admiration, almost a rhymed dictionary of
mythology, whose incongruity is made apparent
by those poems in which, leaving his classics
passionately aside, he went, like a scholar gipsy,
to seek a new accomplishment in the simplicity
of folk-song.

Wilde's reputation as a poet does not rest on
this first book, but on half a dozen poems that
include ' The Harlot's House,' ' A Symphony
in Yellow,' 'The Sphinx' and 'The Ballad of
Reading Gaol/ and alone are worthy of a place
beside his work in prose. But, though poetry
is rare in it, it will presently be recognized

51

OSCAR WILDE

that the first books of few men are so rich
in autobiography. We have seen that the book
is an index to his reading : let us see now how
many indications it gives us of his life.

Threaded through the book, between the
longer poems, runs an itinerary of his travels
in Italy and Greece, written by a young man
very conscious of being a poet, and keenly sen-
sible of what it was fitting he should feel. In
Italy, for example, he thought that he owed
himself a conversion to the Catholic faith :—

" Before yon field of trembling gold
Is garnered into dusty sheaves,
Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves
Flutter as birds adown the wold,

I may have run the glorious race,

And caught the torch while yet aflame,
And called upon the holy name

Of Him who now doth hide his face."

He wrote almost as a Catholic might write,
and spoke of the Pope as " the prisoned shep-
herd of the Church of God." But later, when

" The silver trumpets ran across the Dome :

The people knelt upon the ground with awe :
And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome,"

he turned, as a Puritan might have turned,
from the emblem, triple-crowned, and clothed

52

POEMS

in red and white, of Christ's sovereignty, to
remember a passage in the gospels : " Foxes
have holes, and birds of the air have nests ; but
the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."
He had a Calvinistic, half-shocked and half-
exultant vision of his own iniquity, this under-
graduate of twenty-three : —

" My heart is as some famine-murdered land

Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God's throne should stand."

Yet he took hope : —

" My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw,
Nathless I threw them as my final cast
Into the sea, and waited for the end.
When lo ! a sudden glory ! and I saw

From the black waters of my tortured past
The argent splendour of white limbs ascend ! "

He had, in short, a religious experience, such
as is known by most young men. Perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that he was dis-
turbed, delightfully disturbed, by feeling that
a religious experience was possible to him. He
went on to Greece, and, remembering Plato,
forgot the half-hoped, half-feared sensation of a
wholly voluntary repose in Christianity.

He returned to Oxford, to win the New-
digate Prize in the next year, and to remember,
with something of a girl's adventurous regret

53

OSCAR WILDE

for a lover whom she has rejected, his Italian
emotion. All this is written down in 6 The
Burden of Itys ' : —

" This English Thames is holier far than Rome,

Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea
Breaking across the woodland, with the foam

Of meadow-sweet and white anemone
To fleck their blue waves, — God is likelier there
Than hidden in that crystal-hearted star the pale monks
bear " ;

and, in a later stanza : —

' ' strange, a year ago
I knelt before some crimson Cardinal
Who bare the Host across the Esquiline,
And now — those common poppies in the wheat seem twice
as fine."

' Panthea,' in language that suggests that he
is looking for approval from the eyes of Swin-
burne, describes his substitute for that refused
conversion. It is the creed of a young poet
who finds the gods asleep, and does not care,
because of Darwin, Evolution, and the Law of
the Conservation of Energy.

" With beat of systole and of diastole

One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart,
And mighty waves of single Being roll

From nerveless germ to man, for we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what
we kill."

54

POEMS

And:-

" From lower cells of waking life we pass

To full perfection ; thus the world grows old : "

and: —

" This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn
Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,
Ay ! and those argent breasts of thine will turn

To water-lilies ; the brown fields men till
Will be more fruitful for our love to-night,
Nothing is lost in Nature, all things live in Death's
despite."

It is boy's thought, as serious as the sentimental
dreaming of a girl. There is no need to laugh
at either. No young girl ever yet made a great
poem out of her inexperience, nor has any young
man turned to great art his hurried reading of
the universe. But few great men have been
without such thoughts in youth, and the noblest
women can remember girlish dreams of an in-
credible unreality.

After taking his degree Wilde left Oxford
and came to London to build up that phantom
of himself that helped to advertise him, and,
at the same time, to make his progress difficult.
He dedicates a sonnet to 'My Friend Henry
Irving,' another to Sarah Bernhardt, and two
to Ellen Terry, * Written at the Lyceum
Theatre.5 We have an impression of the young
man, more elaborately dressed than he can
afford, paying extravagant, delightful compli-

55

OSCAR WILDE

ments, and quickly gaining the sort of reputation
that was given to gallants of an older time, who
knew actors, and had their seats on the stage.

Finally, and certainly most important in his
own eyes, the book contains a record of the love
affair which, in a sense, balanced the abortive
religious experience. He fell in love with an
actress, who found him quite delightful, did not
love him, let him love her for a summer, and
then told him not to waste his time. Wilde, as
a young poet, probably came to town prepared
to fall in love, just as he had gone to Italy pre-
pared to be converted to Catholicism. His
actress may have recognized that this was so,
and been ready, within reason, to play the part
assigned her. Through Wilde's magnificent
phrasing there appears a replica of the love
affairs of how many boys with women wiser
than themselves and not without a sense of
humour.

" Ah ! hadst thou liked me less and loved me more,
Through all these summer days of joy and rain,
I had not now been sorrow's heritor,

Or stood a lackey in the House of Pain."

But he had not to grumble : he had been able
to love her learnedly in sonnets and gallantly
in serenades. He had —

" Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed

The Love which moves the Sun and all the Stars ! "
56

POEMS

That was really all that he had needed, but
an awakening critical faculty told him that he
won more pain than poetry.

" Had my lips been smitten into music by the kisses that but

made them bleed,

You had walked with Bice and the angels on that verdant
and enamelled mead."

He was disappointed, but the fault was not his,
not his lady's, but due only to impatience. He
who wills to love has rhetoric in his feeling,
and, though he wrote —

" I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though

youth is gone in wasted days,

1 have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the
poet's crown of bays,"

we cannot help thinking that we know better.

The book is the monument of Wilde's boy-
hood, and contains its history. Perhaps that,
though it may save it from oblivion, is the reason
of its failure. It is too immediate an attempt
to translate life into literature. Sometimes it
even suggests that there has been an attempt
to make life simply for the purpose of transcrib-
ing it. Wilde disguised it in elaboration, but
it wears the mask with an ingenuous awkward-
ness. It is so youthful. Indeed, the youth of
the book is its justification, and helps it to throw
a flickering light upon his later work. For
Wilde never entirely lost his boyhood, and died,

57

OSCAR WILDE

as he had mostly lived, young. Five years after
the publication of Poems he wrote a letter in
which, catching exactly the mood of his under-
graduate days of ten years before, he said that
he wished he could grave his sonnets on an ivory
tablet, since sonnets should always look well.
That is the precise sentiment of those who seek
" to discover the proper temper in which a triolet
should be written." It was his whenever he
wished. But, though he could recapture the
mood, and assume again the attitude, he did not
allow himself to imitate the work that mood
and attitude had produced. In that white
vellum volume were harvested all the wild oats
of the intellect that he did not leave to later
gleaners. He was free thenceforth, and seldom
again, until the magnificent confession De Pro-
fundis, did he allow his experiences the use of
the first person.1 He had done with the crude
subjectivity of boyhood, whose capital " I "
seems so unreal beside the complete fusions
of soul and body, manner and material, that
Art demands and that he was later to achieve.

1 Except, of course, in the lectures. We must remember their
occasion, and that it never occurred to him to reprint them or
count them among his works.

58

IV
jESTHETIClSM

" I NEVER object," said Coleridge, " to a certain
degree of disputatiousness in a young man from
the age of seventeen to that of four or five and
twenty, provided I find him always arguing on
one side of the question." Coleridge would
seem to reserve legitimate dispute for the very
young, did we not remember that academic
education began and ended earlier in his day.
Boys went to college at seventeen. I do not
think he would have objected to the disputa-
tiousness of Wilde, although he was well over
twenty-five before he left the noisy field of
argument, if, indeed, he left it at all. Wilde, at
least, would have pleased Coleridge by arguing
always on one side of the question, though it is
possible that Coleridge would not have recog-
nized that that side was his own. At Oxford,
Wilde had already begun to count himself, if not
an inventor, at least an exponent of the sesthetic
theories of life that were then disturbing with
fitful movements the stagnant surface of British
Philistinism. He did not plan a Pantisocracy,

59

OSCAR WILDE

and would have turned with fright from
Coleridge's sturdy proposal to harden the bodies
of those accustomed to intellectual and sedentary
labour until they were fitted to share in the
tilling of the soil. But he was discontented
with life as it was commonly lived, and had
learnt to hope that it might be beautified by
being set among beautiful things. He had
expressed a wish that he could " live up to his
blue china." His rooms in Magdalen, panelled
and hung with engravings chosen for their
difference from the pictures commonly affected,
had been a centre of debate. His attitude had
caused discussion and public protest, for he rode
but did not hunt, did not play cricket, watched
boat-races but did not go on the river, and only
once showed much physical activity, when he
wheeled Ruskin's barrow during the famous ex-
pedition of undergraduate navvies to make a
road on Hinksey Marsh.1

We shall, perhaps, be better able to under-
stand the first period of Wilde's public pro-
minence, if we examine the origins of the
movement of which, by accident and inclination,
he became the accepted protagonist. Continental
critics have noticed in his writings theories so
closely analogous to those of the French Sym-
bolists that they find it difficult not to believe

1 " The ^Esthetic Movement in England/' by Walter Hamilton.

60

^ESTHETICISM

that he was a disciple of that school, and, as it
were, an English representative of Mallarme"s
salon in the Rue de Rome. It is true that, like
the Symbolists, he sought intensity in art, and
emphasis of its potential at the expense of its
kinetic qualities. But in this he was English as
well as French. Later in his life he was in-
fluenced by Maeterlinck and by Huysmans, but,
while he was at Oxford and for some time after,
he found his rules of art and life in the teaching
of the Pre-Raphaelites. That teaching repre-
sents a movement in the same direction as the
Symbolists, but a movement which, unlike the
French, came to be identified with a desire to
bring ordinary life into harmony with the in-
tensity it demanded from art.

It is worth while to gain a clear perspective by
discovering the relation between such men as
Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Ruskin, and
the cult of knee-breeches and chrysanthemums
with which Punch and "Patience" identified
Wilde. This cult was not a sudden sporadic
flowering of strange blooms in the frail hands
of a few undergraduates. It had its origin in
1848, when the members of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood founded The Germ, an extra-
ordinarily earnest little monthly magazine, in
which appeared Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel,"
and etchings by Holman Hunt and Madox

61

OSCAR WILDE

Brown. Perhaps, indeed, it had an earlier
origin in the poetry of Keats, whose pure
devotion to art for art's sake foreshadowed the
feeling of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, or in
the poetry of Blake, who, like them, emphasized
the difference between the Sons of David and
the Philistines. But, if we go back so .far, we
must go further and find still deeper roots for it
in the great figures of the Romantic Movement,
in the figures who made that movement possible,
in Goethe, in Rousseau, in Ossian, in Percy's
" Reliques of Ancient English Poetry." Wilde, at
least, saw back thus far into his spiritual ancestry.
But, in the middle of the nineteenth century,
the Pre-Raphaelites, refusing the abstract art
whose beginnings are marked by the technical
skill of Raphael, finding in early Italian paint-
ing, whose spirit was less hidden by clear and
insistent letter, a vivifying principle, stood, not
only for a new kind of painting, but for a new
attitude towards art in general, and then for a
new attitude towards life. They were attacked,
and Ruskin, who thought they were trying to
realize a prophecy of his own, came to aid them
with eloquent defence. Their pictures were sold
but seldom exhibited, so that a kind of separate-
ness, almost a secrecy, came to belong to their
admirers. The public in general looked upon
them as something aloof and mad. It happened,

62

JBSTHETICISM

perhaps through the accident of Miss Siddal and
Mrs. William Morris so frequently sitting as
their models, perhaps because the ladies ex-
emplified what was already their ideal, that there
came into many paintings what is best known as
the Pre-Raphaelite woman, long-necked, and
pomegranate lipped. Nature, as Wilde was never
tired of insisting, is assiduous in her imitation of
art, and, when Sir Coutts Lindsay opened the
Grosvenor Gallery for the benefit of these artists
and their admirers, there were, beside those on
the walls, a sufficient number of Pre-Raphaelite
portraits walking about in the flesh to justify the
curiosity and amusement of the crowd. A play,
"The Colonel," of no great value, and the
wholly delightful " Patience," a comic opera by
Gilbert with music by Sullivan, brought the
" green and yallery " gowns of the " Grosvenor
Gallery " elect, with their poets and flowers and
feelings towards the intenser life, into a charm-
ing masquerade. " Patience " was played at the
Savoy with great success. Mr. D'Oyly Carte,
attempting to repeat this success in America,
perceived that Americans, being without a
Grosvenor Gallery, missed much of the humour
of the play, and conceived the Napoleonic
scheme of sending over a specimen aesthete to
show what " Patience " was laughing at. This
somewhat ignominious position was, with due

63

OSCAR WILDE

diplomacy, offered to Oscar Wilde, on account
of his extravagance in dress,1 and proudly
accepted by him on the wilful supposition that it
was a fitting tribute to his recently published
Poems. That is how it came about that on
December 24, 1881, Wilde sailed for New
York, to say that he was disappointed in the
Atlantic, to tell the Customs Officials that he
had nothing to declare except his genius, and to
lecture throughout America on "The English
Renaissance of Art," " House Decoration," and
" Art and the Handicraftsman."

Youth and vanity helped to blind him to the
rather humiliating reason of his lecturing. He
wanted the money, but was able to persuade
himself that he had really been chosen to repre-
sent the aesthetic movement to the American
people on account of his book of poems, and
that, in any case, he wanted to go to America to
have F^era, a worthless melodrama he had just
written, put upon the stage. With his happy
power of dramatizing his position, a power he
shared with Beau Brummel and picturesque
adventurers of lesser genius, he saw himself,
almost immediately, as a sort of combination of
William Morris and John Ruskin, gifted more

1 He wore at this time a velvet Wret on his head, his shirts
turned back with lace over his sleeves, puce velveteen knicker-
bockers with buckles, and black silk stockings.

64

jESTHETICISM

than they with wit, beauty, and youth. He
spoke of himself visiting the South Kensington
Museum on Saturday nights, " to see the handi-
craftsman, the wood-worker, the glass-blower,
and the worker in metals." He inspected art-
schools, and carried away, to show his audiences,
brass dishes beaten by little boys, and wooden
bowls painted by little girls. He began to take
himself more and more seriously — no doubt
Punch's caricatures had helped him, and he was
alone in America, far from the facts — and was
able to tell his listeners "how it first came to me
at all to create an artistic movement in England,
a movement to show the rich what beautiful
things they might enjoy and the poor what
beautiful things they might create." By this
time I have no doubt that he believed with per-
fect good faith that the aesthetic movement was
the work and aim of his life. Only occasionally
did he remember that he was living up to
" Patience." " You have listened to ' Patience '
for a hundred nights," he said, "and you have
heard me for one only. It will make, no doubt,
that satire more piquant by knowing something
about the subject of it, but you must not judge
of asstheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert."
Once, indeed, he allowed himself to remind his
audience of the extravagances at which that
opera laughed, but then it was only to defend
E 65

OSCAR WILDE

them with all the solemnity of an apostle. " You
have heard, I think, a few of you, of two
flowers connected with the aesthetic movement
in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously)
to be the food of some aesthetic young men.
Well, let me tell you that the reason we love
the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr.
Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable
fashion at all. It is because these two lovely
flowers are in England the two most perfect
models of design, the most naturally adapted
for decorative art — the gaudy leonine beauty of
the one and the precious loveliness of the other
giving to the artist the most entire and perfect
joy." This seems insufferable now, and probably
was so then, but it is a proof of the perfection
with which Wilde played the part his stage-
manager had assigned him.

There is much that is charming in the
lectures, together with much that is ridicu-
lous, and some of the charm is in the folly.
It is a very young knight who fights with
a lily on his helmet and a sunflower tied to
his spear-point. He has not perceived that the
battle is at all difficult. He does not try with
slow argument to undermine the enemy's posi-
tion, but only says, quite cheerfully, that he
would like to win. "When I was at Leadville
and reflected that all the shining silver that

66

^STHETICISM

I saw coming from the mines would be made
into ugly dollars, it made me sad. It should be
made into something more permanent. The
golden gates at Florence are as beautiful to-day
as when Michael Angelo saw them." He does
not ever come to blows, but only says how ready
he is for battle. " I have no respect," he quotes
from Keats, " for the public, nor for anything in
existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of
great men and the principle of Beauty." And
he shows that the great men are on his side. In
one lecture alone he appeals to Goethe, Rousseau,
Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Homer,
Dante, Morris, Keats, Chaucer, Hunt, Millais,
Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ruskin, Swinburne,
Tennyson, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci,
Edgar Allan Poe, Phidias, Michael Angelo,
Sophocles, Milton, Fra Angelico, Rubens,
Leopardi, Titian, Giorgione, Hugo, Balzac,
Shakespeare, Mazzini, Petrarch, Baudelaire,
Theocritus, and Gautier.

Indeed, his relation to the aesthetic movement
of 1880 is not unlike that of Gautier to the
Romantic movement of 1830. Gautier, like
Wilde, was born into an army already on the
march, and became its most violent champion
and exemplar. Gautier's crimson waistcoat
balances Wilde's knee-breeches. It would be
possible to carry the comparison further, and to

67

OSCAR WILDE

find in Dorian Gray a parallel to " Mademoiselle
de Maupin." An identical spirit presided over
the writing of both these books. And it would
be easy to find in Wilde, at any rate before
his release from prison, an aloofness from
ordinary life not at all unlike that of the man
who exclaimed, " Je suis un homme des temps
hom&iques ; — le monde ou je vis n'est pas le
mien, et je ne comprends rien a la societd qui
m'entoure." I can imagine Gautier lecturing
Americans in just such a manner as Wilde's, and
forgetting, but for his loyalty to Hugo, that he
had not invented Romanticism.

Wilde's lectures must have amused if they did
not edify America. He urged the miners to
retain their high boots, their blouses, their
sombreros, when, with wealth in their pockets,
they should return to the abomination of
civilization. Surprised audiences in the towns
heard him speak seriously of the stolid ugliness
of the horse-hair sofa, and still more seriously of
stoves decorated with funeral urns in cast iron.
He begged them to realize the importance of a
definite scheme of colour in their rooms, and to
use other kinds of jugs than one. In his inde-
pendence of the quarrels of his elders, he talked
to them as Ruskin might have talked, of the
craftsman and his place in life, and, at the same
time, praised the Peacock Room and the roorn in

68

^ESTHETICISM

blue and yellow designed by that American
whom Ruskin had accused of throwing a
pot of paint in the public's face. On one
or two occasions Americans were rude to him.
But he spoke with such courtesy and such
obvious benevolence that more often they were
content to pay their dollars, listen to him
attentively, stare at him curiously, and then go
to see " Patience."

Wilde took their dollars, left the propagation
of beautiful furniture behind him, and went to
Paris. He was tired of prophecy and ready to
take a new part in a new play. He had

"... touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay,"

and now, seeking the fresh woods of the Bois,
and the new pastures of the Champs Elysees, he
" twitched his mantle " and threw it away, and
with it sunflower, lily, and knee-breeches, pre-
ferring a change of costume with his change of
part. He dressed now as a man of fashion, a
dandy, but not an aesthete. He even cut his
hair. But the reputation he had made swelled
before him. He came to Paris, after his
lecturing, in 1883, but, as late as 1891, for those
who had not seen him, Wilde "n'etait encore
que celui qui fumait des cigarettes a bout d'or
et qui se promenait dans les rues une fleur de

69

OSCAR WILDE

tournesol a la main." He may even have
encouraged this reputation. Stuart Merrill,
writing in La Plume, said : " Certains cochers
de hansom affirment meme 1'avoir vu se pro-
mener, vers 1'heure des chats et des poetes, avec
un lys enorme a la main. Oscar Wilde recuse
comme a regret leur temoignage en repondant
que la legende est souvent plus vraie que la
realite." But in 1883 Wilde had had a surfeit
of lilies and sunflowers, and came to Paris as a
poet, fashionably dressed, with a number of
white vellum volumes of verse to distribute
among those whose acquaintance he wished to
secure.

He took rooms at the Hotel Voltaire, and saw
most of the better known people of the day.
But, as always, he was not content to leave a
part half played. He was in Paris as a poet,
and, if he was ready to receive the poet's
reward of admiration and homage, he was
determined also to earn it, to write poetry,
and not to rest on what he had already
written. He was, at this time, impressed
as much by Balzac's power of work as by his
genius, and his biographer tells us that, with a
view to imitating it, he wore, while working,
a white robe with a hood, like the dressing-gown
in which Balzac sat up at night, drinking coffee
and creating his fiery world. He also walked

70

^BSTHETICISM

out with an ivory stick, set with turquoises, like
the stick that pleased Balzac because it set the
town talking. At a later time he sought a
similar adventitious aid to industry in buying
Carlyle's writing table. He felt, like Balzac, that
the special paraphernalia of work was likely to
induce the proper spirit. In these circumstances,
in the Hotel Voltaire, he finished The Duchess of
Padua, and possibly either wrote or re-wrote
The Sphinx.

The Duchess of Padua is a play on the
Elizabethan model of dark and bloody tragedy.
It is a sombre spectacle, marred by a constantly
shifting perspective. The folds of tragedy's
cloak fall over an angular figure, a little stiff in
the joints, and the verse has the effect of
voluntary draping. It is the performance of a
young man who has not yet achieved the know-
ledge of the stage that was later to be his ; the
performance of a young man who has not yet
achieved a knowledge of himself. It is better
built than Vera and more interesting, but it has
the faults of the 1881 volume of Poems, without
the same excuse of eager imitation and criticism.
Here and there are lines of poetry that seem now
afraid and now defiant of the progress of the
play. The poet changes faces too often. He
has all the Elizabethans at his back, and writes
like the young Shakespeare on one page, and on

71

OSCAR WILDE

the next like Shakespeare grown mature. His
predilections are now for simplicity and now for
such overworked conceits as this : —

" GUIDO. Oh, how I love you !

See, I must steal the cuckoo's voice, and tell
This one tale over.

DUCHESS. Tell no other tale !

For, if that is the little cuckooes song,
The nightingale is hoarse, and the loud lark
Has lost its music."

Wilde's weakness of grip on himself and his
play is shown by the quite purposeless inclusion

of cumbersome, would-be-Shakespearian comic
relief: —

" THIRD CITIZEN. What think you of this young man
who stuck the knife into the Duke ?

SECOND CITIZEN. Why, that he is a well-behaved, and
a well-meaning, and a well-favoured lad, and yet wicked
in that he killed the Duke.

THIRD CITIZEN. Twas the first time he did it : maybe
the law will not be hard on him, as he did not do it
before."

That is a specimen very favourable to the play,
which contains yet duller jokes. It is hard to
believe that the same man who wrote them was
also the author of Intentions and the inventor of
Bunbury. But there is no need to linger over

72

^ESTHETICISM

The Duchess of Padua, which, though it has
moments of obscure power, Wilde did not, in
later years, consider worthy of himself.

There is some doubt as to the date of com-
position of The Sphinx. A line and a half in
it—

" I have hardly seen

Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn's
gaudy liveries " —

not only suggest extreme youth in the writer,
but occur in Ravenna. Mr. Stuart Mason, in
his admirable " Bibliography to the Poems of
Oscar Wilde," says that " altogether some dozen
passages of Ravenna are taken more or less
verbatim from poems published before 1878,
while no instance is found of lines in the Newdi-
gate Prize Poem being repeated in poems
admittedly of later date, and this," he thinks,
"seems fairly strong proof that the lines in
The Sphinx (if not the whole poem) antedate
Ravenna." Mr. Ross says that Wilde told him
the poem was written at the Hotel Voltaire
during an earlier visit in 1874. This statement,
he thinks, was an example of the poetic license
in which Wilde, like Shelley and other men of
genius, was willing to indulge. Mr. Sherard
says positively that Wilde wrote The Sphinx in
1883 at the Hotel Voltaire. There seems to be
no real reason why Wilde should not have

73

OSCAR WILDE

borrowed from Ravenna on this, even if he did
so on no other occasion. He was always ready
to seem younger than he was, and always ready
to use again a phrase that had pleased him, no
matter where he had used it before. In The
Duchess of Padua, about whose date there is no
question, he even went so far as to use two lines
from a sonnet that he had previously addressed
to Ellen Terry, and published in Poems : —

" O hair of gold, O crimson lips, O face
Made for the luring and the love of man ! "

There is much in the poem itself that inclines
me to trust Mr. Sherard's memory of its date.

It is work more personal to Wilde than any-
thing in Poems. The firm mastery of its tech-
nique would, indeed, be overwhelming proof
that it was written after The Duchess of Padua
if it were not known that Wilde spent some
time in revising it in 1889. But revision cannot
alter the whole texture of a poem, and The
Sphinx is full of those decorative effects that are
rare in his very early work and give to much of
his matured writing its most noticeable quality.
No one has suggested that it was written later
than 1883, so that we must explain the extra-
ordinary advance that it shows on The Duchess
of Padua as one of those curious phenomena
known to most artists : it often happens that, in

74

JESTHETICISM

turning from one kind of work to another, as
from dramatic writing to poetry, men come
quite suddenly on what seem to be revised and
better editions of themselves.

The kinetic base, the obvious framework, of
The Sphinx is an apostrophe addressed by a
student to a Sphinx that lies in his room, perhaps
a dream, perhaps a paperweight, an apostrophe
that consists in the enumeration of her possible
lovers, and the final selection of one of them as
her supposed choice. It is a series rather than
a whole, though an effect of form and cumula-
tive weight is given to it by a carefully pre-
served monotony. In a firm, lava-like verse, the
Sphinx's paramours are stiffened to a bas-relief.
The water-horse, the griffon, the hawk-faced
god, the mighty limbs of Ammon, are formed
into a frieze of reverie ; they do not collaborate
in a picture, but are left behind as the dream
goes on. It goes on, perhaps, just a little too
long. So do some of the finest rituals; and
The Sphinx is among the rare incantations in
our language. It is a piece of black magic. Of
the student who saw such things men might
well say : —

" Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,"

but they could never continue : —

t( For he on honey-dew hath fed/'
75

OSCAR WILDE

and, with whatever milk he had been nourished,
they would be certain that it was not that of
Paradise.

" Dawn follows Dawn and Nights grow old, and all

the while this curious cat

Lies crouching on the Chinese mat with eyes of
satin rimmed with gold."

To paint the visions she inspires, Wilde ransacks
the world for magnificent colouring. He does
not always secure magnificence in the noblest
way, but is satisfied with an opulence, rather of
things than of emotion, brought bodily into the
verse and not suggested by the proud stepping
of the mind. Cleopatra's wine, ivory-bodied
Antinous, the crocodile with jewelled ears,
metal-flanked gryphons, gilt-scaled dragons,

" Some Nereid coiled in amber foam with curious rock-crystal
breasts,"

the Ethiopian, "whose body was of polished
jet," Pasht " who had green beryls for her eyes,"
Horus,

" Whose wings, like strange transparent talc, rose high above

his hawk-faced head,

Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with rods of
Oreichalch,"

the marble limbs of Ammon, "on pearl and
porphyry pedestalled," an ocean emerald on his
ivory breast —

76

JESTHETICISM

"The merchants brought him steatite from Sidon in their

painted ships :

The meanest cup that touched his lips was fashioned from
a chrysolite "

the lion's "long flanks of polished brass," the
tiger's "amber sides": — I think it is worth
while to notice the mineral character of all this
imagery. It is as if a man were finding solace
for his feverish hands in the touch of cool hard
stones, and at the same time, stimulating his
fever by the sexual excitement of contrast be-
tween the over-sensitive and the utterly in-
sensible.

Wilde had but a short respite from the trouble
of keeping up a reputation and an income. The
American dollars were soon spent, and he had
to bring to an end his Balzacian industry, and
the delightful business of being a poet in Paris.
He returned to London, where he took rooms in
Charles Street, Haymarket. He had to earn a
livelihood, and poverty and his own extrava-
gance compelled him to do that which he most
disliked, to take up again a pose whose fascina-
tion he had exhausted. He signed an agreement
with a lecture agency, and toured through
the English provinces, repeating, as cheerfully
as he could, the lectures he had given in
America.

77

OSCAR WILDE

NOTE ON WILDE AND WHISTLER

Both before and after his American lecturing tour Wilde was
one of the frequenters of Whistler's studio in Chelsea. He had
an unbounded admiration for this painter, whose conversation
was no less vivid than his work, and Whistler's attitude
towards him was not so cavalier as that he adopted to others
among his admirers. Wilde, in spite of his youth, had a
reputation, and shared with Whistler the applause of any
company in which they were together. In 1883, when
Wilde was to lecture to the Academy Students, he asked
Whistler what he should say to them. Whistler sketched
a lecture for him, and Wilde used parts of it with
success and repaid him by a tremendous compliment. Two
years later Whistler himself lectured, and, for his "Ten
O'Clock," re-appropriated some of the material he had sug-
gested to his friend. That is the origin of the accusation,
so often made, that Wilde built a reputation on borrowed
bons mots. In the "Ten O'Clock," Whistler, annoyed by
Wilde's lecturing on art, as he would have been by the
lecturing of any other man who was not himself a painter,
held a veiled figure of him up to ridicule, and threw a stone
from a frail house in jeering at his knee-breeches. "Costume
is not dress. And the wearers of wardrobes may not be
doctors of taste ..." Wilde smilingly replied. Whistler
feinted. Wilde parried. Whistler thrust :— " What has
Oscar in common with Art except that he dines at our
tables and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding
that he peddles in the provinces? Oscar — the amiable,
irresponsible, esurient Oscar — with no more sense of a picture
than he has of the fit of a coat — has the courage of the
opinions ... of others ! " Wilde answered that " with our
James vulgarity begins at home and should be allowed to
stay there," and with that their friendship was buried, like
the hatchet, "in the side of the enemy." Two years later,
Wilde, with an indifference amusing in any case and delight-

78

WHISTLER

fill if it was conscious, roused further protest by using in
"The Decay of Lying" the phrase, "the courage of the
opinions of others," that had been the sting of Whistler's
reproach. The letters on both sides may be read in " The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies." The whole story only
makes it clear that Wilde was better able to appreciate
Whistler than Whistler to appreciate a younger man, whose
talent, no less brilliant, was entirely different from his own.
As Mr. Ross has pointed out, all Wilde's best work was
written after their friendship ceased.

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

ON May 29, 1884, Oscar Wilde was married
to Constance Mary Lloyd, the daughter of a
Dublin barrister. He settled with her in Chel-
sea. They had two children, both boys, born
respectively in 1885 and 1886. Wilde's mar-
riage was not felicitous, though he regretted
it more for his wife's sake than his own. It is
said that Mrs. Wilde was rather cruelly made
to pose for Lady Henry Wotton in Dorian
Gray, that " curious woman, whose dresses
always looked as if they had been designed in
a rage and put on in a tempest. . . . She tried
to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being
untidy . . . looking like a bird of paradise that
had been out all night in the rain. . . ." She
was sentimental, pretty, well-meaning and
inefficient. She would have been very happy
as the wife of an ornamental minor poet, and
it is possible that in marrying Wilde she mis-
took his for such a character. It must be
remembered that she married the author of
Poems and the lecturer on the aesthetic move-
ment. His development puzzled her, made her

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

feel inadequate, and so increased her inadequacy.
She became more a spectacle for Wilde than
an influence upon him, and was without the
strength that might have prevented the disasters
that were to fall through him on herself. She
had a passion for leaving things alone, broken
only by moments of interference badly timed.
She became one of those women whose Chris-
tian names their husbands, without malice,
preface with the epithets "poor dear." Her
married life was no less ineffectual than un-
happy.

Wilde supplemented his wife's income by
writing reviews of books for The Pall Mall
Gazette, and articles on the theatre for The
Dramatic Review. From the autumn of 1887
to that of 1889 he edited The Woman's World.
Little of this was wasted labour, though Wilde
had no need to fillip his invention by such prac-
tice as the writing of reviews provided. Conver-
sation was to him what diaries, note-books, and
hack-work are to so many others. But there is
an ease in the essays of Intentions wholly lack-
ing in 'The Rise of Historical Criticism' and
in the lectures. It is impossible not to believe
that in writing literary notes in The Woman's
World and reviews in The Pall Mall Gazette, he
quickened the turn of his wrist and sharpened
the point of his rapier.
F 81

OSCAR WILDE

There is little of any great value in the
volume of reviews collected by his executor ;
little, that is to say, that raises them above the
level of reviews written by far less gifted men.
Here and there are fragments that he improved
and used again in more lasting works. Here
and there are perfectly charming sentences, that
show what sort of man would be found if we
could lift the mask of the reviewer. Through-
out the book are uncertain indications of the
theories of art that were later to be expounded
in Intentions. But that is all. There is, how-
ever, an historical interest in learning what
Wilde thought of the writers of his time. He
railed at the shocking bad grammar of Professor
Saintsbury, and got an undergraduate enjoy-
ment from laughing at Professor Mahaffy.
When he could, he piously drew attention to
the works of his father and mother. He was
polite to his cousin, W. G. Wills, who had
happened to be delivered of an epic. Among
greater men, he had excellent praise for William
Morris, a just appreciation of Pater, an en-
thusiasm for Meredith, the expression of which
he afterwards used in Intentions, and a per-
spicuous criticism of Swinburne. The volume
is full of clues to the sources of the inessentials
in his later work. The original of the passage
in Dorian Gray on embroideries and tapestries

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

is to be found in a review of a book by Ernest
Lefebure. The Starchild's curls " were like the
rings of the daffodil." This curious and delight-
ful phrase may be traced to a review of Morris'
translation of the Odyssey, where Wilde noticed
the line,

" With the hair on his head crisp curling as the bloom of
the daffodil/'

and quoted another version published in 1665,

" Minerva renders him more tall and fair.
Curling in rings like daffodils his hair."

It would be possible to make a long list of such
alibis.

Marriage and journalism slackened for a
moment his ambition. He lectured once or
twice, though Whistler had almost succeeded
in discrediting him as an authority upon art.
His reputation waned, and he was for some
time a young man with a brilliant past. Art
seemed less worth while than it had been, and
he was ready to amuse himself with things that
he thought scarcely worth writing, things that
required more cleverness than temperament,
and did not stretch his genius. It was in this
mood that he turned to narrative, and wrote the
four stories which, published in magazines in
1887, were collected into a volume in 1891.
He had always been accustomed to invent plots
for other people, and to compose such anecdotes

83

OSCAR WILDE

as were needed to illustrate his conversation and
to give it an historical basis. Mr. Sherard says
that he used to devise stories, sometimes as
many as six in a morning, for his brother
William to write. It occurred to him to write
some of these tales himself, and, using the
conventions of the popular magazine fiction
of his day, yet find means to indulge his mind
with the ingenious play in which it delighted.
Three of these tales need detain no student
of Wilde. « The Canterville Ghost ' is just so
boisterous as to miss its balance, but, because
it is about Americans, is very popular in
America. 'The Sphinx without a Secret'
betrays its secret in its title. ' The Model
Millionaire' is an empty little thing no better
than the popular tales it tries to imitate. ' Lord
Arthur Savile's Crime," however, is not only
remarkable as an indication of what Wilde was
to do both as a dramatist and as a storyteller,
but is itself a delightful piece of buffoonery.
Wilde is so serious. The readers of The Family
Herald are fond of Lords, and so the story
begins with a reception at Bentinck House,
a delightful parody of the popular descriptions
of such a function. " It was certainly a
wonderful medley of people. Gorgeous
peeresses chatted affably to violent Radicals,
popular preachers brushed coat-tails with emi-

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

nent sceptics, a perfect bevy of bishops kept
following a stout prima-donna from room to
room, on the staircase stood several Royal
Academicians, disguised as artists, and it was
said that at one time the supper-room was
absolutely crammed with geniuses." There
was a cheiromantist, and a Duchess, who, on
learning that he was present, "began looking
about for a small tortoiseshell fan and a very
tattered lace shawl, so as to be ready to go at a
moment's notice." The plot is no less moral
than simple. Lord Arthur Savile learns from
the palmist that at some period of his life it is
decreed that he shall commit a murder. Un-
willing to marry while a potential criminal,
he sets about committing the murder at once,
to get it over, and be able to marry with the
easy conscience of one who knows that his duty
has been satisfactorily performed. He tries to
kill a charming aunt with a sugared pill, and a
benevolent uncle with an explosive clock, and,
failing in both these essays, " oppressed with the
barrenness of good intentions," walks miserably
on the Embankment, where he finds Mr.
Podgers, the cheiromantist, observing the river.
"A brilliant idea flashed across him, and he stole
softly up behind. In a moment he had seized
Mr. Podgers by the legs, and flung him into the
Thames. There was a coarse oath, a heavy

85

OSCAR WILDE

splash, and all was still. Lord Arthur looked
anxiously over, but could see nothing of the
cheiromantist but a tall hat, pirouetting in an
eddy of moonlit water. After a time it also
sank, and no trace of Mr. Podgers was visible.
Once he thought that he caught sight of the
bulky misshapen figure striking out for the stair-
case by the bridge, and a horrible feeling of
failure came over him, but it turned out to be
merely a reflection, and when the moon shone
out from behind a cloud it passed away. At
last he seemed to have realised the decree of
destiny. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, and
Sybil's name came to his lips." Like much of
Wilde's work, this story is very clever talk, an
elaborated anecdote, told with flickering irony,
a cigarette now and again lifted to the lips.
But, already, a dramatist is learning to use this
irony in dialogue, and a decorative artist is
restraining his buoyant cleverness, to use it
for more subtle purposes. There is a delicate
description of dawn in Piccadilly, with the
waggons on their way to Covent Garden, white-
smocked carters, and a boy with primroses in a
battered hat, riding a big grey horse — a promise
of the fairy stories. The vegetables against the
sky are masses of jade, " masses of green jade
against the pink petals of some marvellous rose."
And, too, over the sudden death of Mr. Podgers

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

"the moon peered through a mane of tawny
clouds, as if it were a lion's eye, and innumer-
able stars spangled the hollow vault, like gold
dust powdered on a purple dome."

The Happy Prince and other Tales, published
in 1888, with pictures by Jacomb Hood and
Walter Crane, are very married stories. In
reading them, I cannot help feeling that Wilde
wrote one of them as an experiment, to show,
I suppose, that he could have been Hans Ander-
sen if he had liked, and his wife importuned
him to make a book of things so charming, so
good, and so true. He made the book, and
there is one beautiful thing in it, ' The Happy
Prince,' which was, I suspect, the first he wrote.
The rest, except, perhaps, 'The Selfish Giant,'
a delightful essay in Christian legend, are tales
whose morals are a little too obvious even for
grown-up people. Children are less willing to
be made good. Wilde was himself perfectly
aware of his danger, and, no doubt, got some
pleasure out of saying so, at the end of the
story called ' The Devoted Friend ' : " ' I am
rather afraid that I have annoyed him,' answered
the Linnet. 'The fact is, that I told him a
story with a moral.' ' Ah 1 that is always
a very dangerous thing to do,' said the Duck.
And I quite agree with her." There is a moral
in ' The Happy Prince,' but there is this differ-

87

OSCAR WILDE

ence between that story and the others, that it
is quite clear that Wilde wanted to write it.
It is Andersen, treated exactly as Wilde
treated Milton in the volume of 1881, only
with more assurance, and a greater certainty
about his own contribution. We recognise
Wilde by the decorative effects that are
scattered throughout the book. He preferred
a lyrical pattern to a prosaic perspective, and,
even more than his wit, his love of decora-
tion is the distinguishing quality of his work.
Andersen might well have invented the story of
the swallow who died to repay the statue for
jewelled eyes and gold-leaf mail given to the
poor of the town of which he had once been the
Happy and unseeing Prince, but he would never
have let the swallow say : " The King is there
in his painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow
linen and embalmed in spices. Round his neck
is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are
withered leaves." And only a swallow belong-
ing to the author of The Sphinx would have
said, " To-morrow my friends will fly up to the
second Cataract. The river horse couches there
among the bulrushes, and on a great granite
throne sits the God Memnon. All night long
he watches the stars, and when the morning
star shines he utters one cry of joy, and then he
is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

to the water's edge to drink. They have eyes
like green beryls, and their roar is louder than
the roar of the Cataract."

In the next year he was again amusing him-
self with fairy tales, writing this time a book
alone in English literature ; a book of tales not
intended for the British child but for those
grown-up people who shared Wilde's own en-
joyment of brilliant-coloured fantasy. He had
learnt to control his invention, although he
did not choose to do without a tuning fork.
Andersen still struck the note to which Wilde
sang, but Flaubert had been his singing master,
and the curious and beautiful tales collected in
A House of Pomegranates are like what I
imagine " The Snow Queen " would have been,
if it had been written by the author of " Saint
Julien 1'Hospitalier." In « The Infanta's Birth-
day,' where one of Goya's grotesques dances
before a painting by Velasquez, the flowers pass
their opinions on the dwarf quite in the Danish
manner. In 'The Star-child': "The Earth is
going to be married, and this is her bridal dress,"
whispered the Turtle-doves to each other.
Their little pink feet were quite frost-bitten,
but they felt that it was their duty to take a
romantic view of the situation." That is surely
written by the ghost of Andersen's English
translator. But 'The Star-child' ends with

89

OSCAR WILDE

the firm, aloof touch of Flaubert, who would
not tolerate " quite " : " Yet ruled he not long,
so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the
fire of his testing, for after the space of three
years, he died. And he who came after him ruled
evilly." I remember the end of " Herodias "
on just such a distant note : " Et tous les trois,
ayant pris la tete de laokanaan, s'en all&rent
du cote de la Galilee. Comme elle etait tres
lourde, ils la portaient alternativement." And
the picture of the leper in this story is almost
a transcription of that in " Saint Julien FHospi-
talier": "Over his face hung a cowl of grey
linen, and through the eyelets his eyes gleamed
like red coals." And Flaubert: "II etait en-
veloppe d'une toile en lambeaux, la figure
pareille a un masque de platre et les deux yeux
plus rouge que des charbons." I do not sug-
gest that one is a copy of the other; but I
think that Wilde remembered that clay mask
with gleaming eyes, and mistook it for a
creation of his own whose eyes shone through
a grey linen cowl.

It is hardly worth while so to carry the study
of influence into detail. Wilde wrote, with the
pen of Flaubert, stories that might have been
imagined by Andersen, and sometimes one and
sometimes the other touches his hand. It is
not impossible that Baudelaire was also present.

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

But all this does not much concern us, except
that by subtraction we may come to what we
seek, which is the personal, elusive, but un-
mistakable quality contributed by Wilde him-
self.

This is, secondarily, a round mellowness of
voice, a smooth solidity of suggested movement,
a delight in magnificence ; and, primarily, a
wonderful feeling for decorative effect. This
last is Wilde's peculiar contribution to litera-
ture. His contribution to thought, his exegesis
of the critical attitude, is another matter. But
this feeling for decoration, that made him see
life itself as a tapestry of ordered and beautiful
movements caught in gold and dyed silk, that
made him incapable of realizing that life was
not so, until at last it became too strong and
tore his canvas, was itself enough to prevent
the picturesque figure of the dandy from ob-
literating the artist in the minds of posterity.
It is scarcely twenty years since Wilde wrote
his books, and, in poetry as well as in prose,
their influence is already becoming so common
as not to be recognized. The historian of
the period will have to trace what he may
call " The Decorative Movement in Litera-
ture " to the works of Wilde, and through them
to the Pre-Raphaelite pictures and poems,
whose ideals he so fantastically misrepresents.

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OSCAR WILDE

I have implied a distinction between decora-
tion and realism that I have not clearly defined.
This distinction is not, though it has often been
held to be, a distinction between two different
kinds of art, between which runs a sharp dividing
line. It is rather a recognition of opposite ends
of a scale, like the recognition of heat and cold,
both degrees of temperature, but without in-
trinsic superiority one over the other. In paint-
ing we thus distinguish between the attempt to
imitate and the willingness (not the intention)
to suggest nature. This distinction is best ex-
pressed in the old simile of the window and the
wall. Some pictures represent a pattern on a
wall : some pictures represent a vision through a
window. In some we look at the canvas : in
others we look through the frame. Some are
decorative : some are realistic. Many painters
have ;wished that their pictures should not be
found wanting when compared with the pictures
of similar subjects that each spectator paints
with the brushes and palette of his own brain.
Sometimes this desire has been carried so far as
to preclude all others. Painters do not usually
read Berkeley, and there have been some who
forgot that there was no such thing as a world
outside their brains, and cared only to be recog-
nised as faithful portrait-painters of nature : that
is to say, of what all spectators see, or can see,

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

by training their observation. There have been
critics, too, like Ruskin, who have chosen to
compare painters by their fidelity to this external
and observable nature. But painters have other
things to do than photograph, other things to
do than to select from what a camera would
represent. Sometimes the idea of imitation
fades away, and they are willing, no more, to
suggest lilies by a convention, and to distort
even the human figure, while they concern
themselves with harmonies in which the shapes
of flower or figure sound merely incidental notes.
We must not forget that these are extremes in
a single scale, and that all painting is to some
extent realistic, to some extent decorative. Its
extremes are wholly imitative in aim, and dull,
and wholly conventional in aim, and empty.
We call the two aims realism and decoration
for our convenience. In literature it is possible
to trace a similar double aim, separate from but
analogous to the duality in speech that we shall
have to examine in a later chapter. There are
books subservient to what we call reality, and
books for which reality is no more than an
excuse, books that follow nature, and books
that cast nature into their own mould, and,
delighting in no accidental harmonies, bend
nature to the patterns that please them, and
heighten or lower her colours for their private

93

OSCAR WILDE

purposes of beautiful creation. Even in music
we can trace these tendencies : there is music
that humbly follows the moods of man, and
music whose serenely indifferent patterns compel
the dancing attendance of those moods.

We have observed in The Sphinx the decora-
tive character of Wilde's work. These tales
provide the best examples of it that are to be
found in his prose. To the woodcutters looking
down from the forest, the Earth seemed " like
a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of
gold." The young fisherman speaks to the
witch of his "painted boat," and his author is
no less aloof from realism. When the young
fisherman forgets his nets and his cunning, as
he listens to the sweet voice of the mermaid,
Wilde writes : " Vermilion finned and with eyes
of bossy gold, the tunnies went by in shoals, but
he heeded them not." Now that is a picture
that the young fisherman could not see. Nor
can we see it, unless the fisherman is a figure
on a tapestry, sewn in stitches of bright-coloured
thread. Above him three undulating lines are
waves, and between them four tunnies, twisting
unanimous tails, show their vermilion fins and
their eyes of gilded metal, skilfully bedded in
the canvas.

Wilde, always perfectly self-conscious, was
not unaware of this difference between his own

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

writing and that of most of his contemporaries.
When Dorian Gray was attacked for immor-
ality, Wilde wrote, in a letter to a paper : " My
story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts
against the brutality of plain realism." The
Picture of Dorian Gray was written for
publication in a magazine. Seven chapters
were added to it to make it long enough for
publication as a novel, because those who buy
books, like those who buy pictures, are unable
to distinguish between size and quality, and
imagine that value depends upon area. The
preface was written to answer assailants of the
morality of the story in its first form, and
included only when it was printed as a book.
These circumstances partly explain the lack of
proportion, and of cohesion, that mars, though
it does not spoil, the first French novel to be
written in the English language. England has
a traditional novel-form with which even the
greatest students of human comedy and tragedy
square their work. In France there is no such
tradition, with the result that the novel is a
plastic form, moulded in the most various ways
by the most various minds. After all, it is a
question of name, and it is impossible without
elaborate and tedious qualification to discuss
classifications of literature. They should not
be made, or they should be made differently,

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OSCAR WILDE

for, at present, they deal only with superficial
resemblances, depending, sometimes, upon noth-
ing more essential than the price for which a
book is sold. They have, however, a distinct
influence upon production. In France, Flaubert's
"Tentation de Saint Antoine," that wonderful
dream in which so many strange dialogues are
overheard, Remy de Gourmont's " Une Nuit au
Luxembourg," that delightful speculative mirage,
and Huysmans' " A Rebours," that phantasma-
goria of intellectual experience, are all included
in publishers' lists of novels and sold as such.
Publishers in England are not so catholic.
Whatever the reason may be, economical,
depending upon the publisher, traditional, de-
pending on the writer, Wilde's The Picture of
Dorian Gray was the first novel for many years
to be written in England with that freedom in
choice of matter and manner that has for a long
time been in no way extraordinary in France.
It has, so far, had no successor free as itself from
the enforced interest in a love affair, to which
we have grown so mournfully accustomed.

The story of the book is a fantastic invention
like that of Balzac's " Le Peau de Chagrin," in
which the scrap of skin from a wild ass shrinks
with each wish of its possessor. The picture of
Dorian Gray, painted by his friend, ages with
the lines of cruelty, lust and hypocrisy that

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

should mar its ever-youthful subject. He,
remaining as beautiful as when at twenty-one
he had inspired the painter with a masterpiece,
walks in the ways of men, sullying his soul,
whose bodily reflection records neither his age
nor his sins. It is the sort of invention that
would have pleased Hawthorne, and the book
itself is written with the marked ethical sym-
pathy that Wilde, in his preface, denounced as
"an unpardonable mannerism of style." Per-
haps the reason why it was so loudly accused of
immorality was that in the popular mind luxury
and sin are closely allied, and the unpardonable
mannerism that made him preach, in a parable,
against the one, did not hide his whole-hearted
delight in describing the other.

The preface, inspired by the hostility the
book aroused, is an essay not in the gentle art
of making enemies, but in that of annoying
them when made. If his critics tell him that
his book leers with the eyes of foulness and
dribbles with the lips of prurience, Wilde replies,
with an ambiguity as disturbing as his smile,
that " it is the spectator, and not life, that art
really mirrors," and again that "the highest, as
the lowest form of criticism is a mode of auto-
biography." His arrows are not angrily tipped
with poison, but are not for that the less dis-
pleasing to those against whom they are
G 97

OSCAR WILDE

directed. They are weighted not with anger
but with aesthetic theory. They are so far
separate from the story that they are best dis-
cussed with the essays of Intentions.

There are a few strange books that share the
magic of some names, like Cornelius Agrippa,
Raymond Lully, and Paracelsus, names that
possibly mean more to us before than after we
have investigated the works and personalities
that lie behind them. These books are
mysterious and kept, like mysteries, for pecu-
liar moods. They are not books for every day,
nor even for every night. We keep them for
rare moments, as we keep in a lacquer cabinet
some crystal-shrined thread of subtle perfume,
or some curious gem, to be a solace in a mood
that does not often recur, or, perhaps, to be an
instrument in its evocation. Dorian Gray,
for all its faults, is such a book. It is un-
balanced ; and that is a fault. It is a mosaic
hurriedly made by a man who reached out in
all directions and took and used in his work
whatever scrap of jasper, or porphyry or broken
flint was put into his hand; and that is not
a virtue. But in it there is an individual
essence, a private perfume, a colour whose
secret has been lost. There are moods whose
consciousness that essence, perfume, colour, is
needed to intensify.

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There is little need to discuss the minutiae of
the book ; to point out that its sayings occur in
Wilde's plays, poems, reviews and dialogues ;
that it is, as it were, an epitome of his wit
before and after the fact ; that the eleventh
chapter is a wonderful condensation of a main
theme in " A Rebours," like an impression of a
concerto rendered by a virtuoso upon a violin.
There is no need to emphasize Wilde's delight
in colour and fastidious luxury, as well as in a
most amusing kind of dandyism : in the open-
ing scene the studio curtains are of tussore silk,
the dust is golden that dances in the sunlight,
tea is poured from a fluted Georgian urn, there
is a heavy scent of roses, the blossoms of the
laburnum are honey-coloured as well as honey-
sweet, Lord Henry Wotton reclines on a divan
of Persian saddlebags, and taps " the toe of his
patent-leather boot with a tasselled ebony cane."
There is no need to point out any of these
things, but they help to justify what I have
already said, and to define the indefinable
character of the book. Lord Henry Wotton
would have liked to write " a novel that would
be as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal."
Wilde tried to write it, and very nearly
succeeded.

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OSCAR WILDE

Wilde's second period of swift development
began towards the end of 1888. This, perhaps,
explains the sentence in ' Pen, Pencil, and
Poison' — "One can fancy an intense person-
ality being created out of sin." His personality
was, certainly, intensified when he became an
habitual devotee of the vice for which he was
imprisoned. He had first experimented in that
vice in 1886 ; his experiments became a habit in
1889, and in that year he published 'Pen,
Pencil, and Poison ' and * The Decay of Lying,'
revised The Sphinx, and wrote some, at least,
of the stories in A House of Pomegranates ;
these were immediately followed by ' The Critic
as Artist ' and Salome.

These things are among his best work. It
is possible that a consciousness of separation
from the common life of men is a sufficient
explanation of an increased vividness in a man's
self, a heightened ardour of production. Is
Wilde's exceptional activity in those years to be
attributed to an eagerness to justify himself by
other men's admiration, of which he had never
been careless ? Was he eager to bring mankind
to his side ? " It is the spectator, not life, that
art really mirrors." This sentence must now
be applied to himself, when we consider The
Portrait of Mr. W. H. That narrative, now
printed at the end of Lord Arthur Saviles

100

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

Crime, and first published in Blackwood's Maga-
zine in 1889, is an essay in criticism.

Wilde read something of himself into Shake-
speare's sonnets, and, in reading, became fascin-
ated by a theory that he was unable to prove.
Where another man would, perhaps, have
written a short, serious essay, and whistled his
theory down the wind that carries the dead
leaves of Shakespeare's commentators, Wilde
tosses it as a belief between three brains, and
allows it to unfold itself as the background to a
story. The three brains are the narrator, Cyril
Graham, and Erskine. Graham discovers the
Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets in a boy-actor called
Will Hughes, and by diligent examination of
internal evidence, almost persuades Erskine to
believe him. Erskine, however, demands a
proof, and Graham finds one for him in a por-
trait of Will Hughes nailed to an old wooden
chest. Erskine is persuaded, but discovers that
the picture is a forgery, whereupon Graham,
explaining that he had only had it made for
Erskine's satisfaction, leaves the picture to his
friend, protests that the forgery in no way in-
validates the theory, and kills himself as a proof
of his good faith. Erskine, disbelieving, tells
all this to the narrator, who instantly sets to
work on the sonnets, finds a quantity of further
evidence, but none that sets beyond question

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OSCAR WILDE

the existence in Elizabethan times of a boy-
actor called William Hughes. He writes
Erskine a letter of passionate reasoning, that,
while persuading Erskine, wipes away his own
belief. He finds that he has become an infidel
to the theory of which he has been a successful
advocate. It was a favourite idea of Wilde's,
and the motive of La Sainte Courtisane, that
to slough off a belief like a snake's skin, one has
only to convert someone else to it. I need not
further analyse the story, which is merely the
mechanism that Wilde used for the display of
the evidence to which he desired to draw
attention.

It would be impossible to build an airier
castle in Spain than this of the imaginary
William Hughes ; impossible, too, to build one
so delightfully designed. The prose and the
reasoning seem things of ivory, Indian-carved,
through which the rarest wind of criticism may
freely blow and carry delicate scents away with-
out disturbing the yet more delicate fabric.
Wilde assumes that Shakespeare addressed the
sonnets to William Hughes, and, that assump-
tion granted (though there is no William
Hughes to be found), colours his theory with
an abundance of persuasive touches, to
strengthen what is, at first, only a courtesy
belief. Though all his argument is special

102

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

pleading, Wilde contrives to make you feel
that counsel knows, though he cannot prove,
that his client is in the right. The evidence
is only for the jury. You are inclined to inter-
rupt him with the exclamation that you are
already convinced. But it is a pleasure to
listen to him, so you let him go on. After
all, "brute reason is quite unbearable. There
is something unfair about its use. It is like hit-
ting below the intellect." Wilde's Portrait of
Mr. W. H. is more than a refutable theory,
a charming piece of speculation. It is an
illustration of the critic as artist, a foretaste of
Intentions. It is better than ' The Truth of
Masks/ as good as ' The Decay of Lying.'
Yet it was not printed in that book, where it
might well have had a place. The reason for
this is not uninteresting. Wilde did not intend
to reprint it as it stood. The theory beneath
that delicate brain-play had a lasting fascina-
tion for him, and, with its proofs, grew in his
mind till it overbalanced Cyril Graham and
doubting Erskine. He re-wrote it at greater
length, after delays. When he was arrested,
the publishers, who had already announced it as
a forthcoming book, returned it to his house,
whence it disappeared on the day of the enforced
sale of his effects. It has never been recovered.

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VI
INTENTIONS

MRS. MALAPROP classes paradoxes with Greek,
Hebrew, simony and fluxions as inflammatory
branches of learning, and, in De Prqfundis,
Wilde says : " What the paradox was to me in
the sphere of thought, perversity became to me
in the realm of passion." Paradox and per-
versity were matches to set fire to his thought
and his dreams. But paradox is not in itself
different from direct speech. It is made by the
statement of a result and the omission of the
steps of reasoning by which that result has
been achieved. When somebody accused Jean
Moreas, that brilliant Greek, of being para-
doxical, he replied: "I do not know what
paradox is ; I believe it is the name which
imbeciles give to the truth." Wilde might have
made a similar answer, and perhaps did. His
paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths. Those of
them that were thought the wildest are already
becoming obvious, for unfamiliarity is a tem-
poral quality like flowers in a road: when a
multitude has passed that way the flowers are
trodden out of sight. Paradox is, however, a

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INTENTIONS

proof of vitality and adventurous thought, and
these things are sometimes the companions of
charm. Unfamiliar truth was, at first, the most
noticeable characteristic of Wilde's Intentions,
but, though paradox may fade to commonplace,
" age cannot wither nor custom stale " the fresh
and debonair personality that keeps the book
alive, tossing thoughts like roses, and playing
with them in happiness of heart.

There is something of the undergraduate about
the book. Its pages might be reprinted from a
college magazine in which a genius was stretch-
ing youthful limbs, instead of from such staid
and respectable reviews as The Fortnightly
and The Nineteenth Century. It belongs to the
days when the most natural thing in life is to
talk until "the dusky night rides down the
sky," and the pale morning light mocks at our
yellow lamp. Indeed, I think that such fresh-
ness and vivacity of writing is the gift of those
authors only who are also talkers. They are
accustomed to see their sentences in company,
not in solitude. They give them a pleasing
strut and swagger and teach them to make
graceful entries and exits neither too cere-
monious nor yet disorderly. Their sentences are
men of the world, and of a world where the
passport to success is charm. It is not so with
lecturers or preachers, whose office puts them in

105

OSCAR WILDE

a different category. But men who talk for
their own enjoyment and that of those who
listen to them are less likely than the others
to compose by eye instead of by ear. It is
actually difficult to read Wilde in silence. His
sentences lift the voice as well as the thoughts
of their writer from the printed page.

Wilde loved speech for its own sake, and
nothing could be more characteristic of his gift
than his choice of that old and inexhaustible
form that Plato, Lucian, Erasmus and Landor,
to name only a few, have turned to such
different purposes. Dialogue is at once per-
sonal and impersonal. " By its means he (the
thinker) can both reveal and conceal himself,
and give form to every fancy, and reality to
every mood. By its means he can exhibit the
object from each point of view, and show it us
in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gain-
ing in this manner all the richness and reality of
effect that comes from those side issues that are
suddenly suggested by the central idea in its
progress, and really illumine the idea more
completely, or from those felicitous after-
thoughts that give a fuller completeness to
the central scheme, and yet convey something
of the delicate charm of chance." Nothing
could better describe Wilde's own essays in
dialogue.

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INTENTIONS

The first of these essays is 'The Decay of
Lying,' in which a young gentleman called
Vivian reads aloud an article on that subject to
a slightly older and rather incredulous young
gentleman called Cyril, commenting as he reads,
answering objections, and sometimes laying
the manuscript on his knees as he follows the
swift-flying swallow of his thought through the
airy mazes of her joyous exercise. Vivian holds
a brief for the artist against the nature that he
is supposed to imitate. He behaves like a
lawyer, first picking his opponent to pieces, lest
the jury should be prejudiced in his favour, and
then proving his own case in so far as it is
possible to prove it. The dialogue is a delight-
ful thing in itself: it is also of the first im-
portance to the student of Wilde's theories of
art. Under its insouciance and extravagance
lie many of the ideas that dictated his attitude
as writer and as critic. Vivian begins by op-
posing the comfort of a Morris chair to the
discomfort of nature's insect-ridden grass, and
complains that nature is as indifferent to her cul-
tured critic as to cow or burdock — which is not
to be borne. He then, a little more seriously,
envisages the history of art as a long warfare
between the simian instinct of imitation and the
God-like instinct of self-expression. He needs
to show that fine art does not imitate, and points

107

OSCAR WILDE

out that Japanese painting, of which, at that
time, everybody was talking, does not concern
itself with Japan, and that the Japan we imagine
for ourselves with the help of willow-pattern
plates and the drawings of Hokusai is no more
real in one sense and no less real in another
than the slit-eyed girl of Gautier's " Chinoiserie,"
who lives in a porcelain tower above the Yellow
River and the long-necked cormorants. Our
ideal Japan has existed only in the minds of the
artists who saw it, and when we cross the seas
to look for it, we find nothing but a few fans
and coloured lanterns. But that is not enough.
We continually see lovely things in nature,
strangely like the things we see in books and
pictures. There is plagiary here, on one
side or on the other, and, with almost ecstatic
courage, Vivian announces that, so far from art
holding the mirror to nature (a view advanced
by Hamlet as a proof of his insanity), nature
imitates art. He may have taken the hint
from Musset, for Fortunio, in the comedy of
that name, exclaims with melancholy criticism :
" Comme ce soleil couchant est manqu£ ce soir.
Regarde moi un peu ce valise l&-bas, ces quatre
ou cinq mdchants nuages qui grimpent sur cette
montagne. Je faisais des paysages comme
celui-la, quand j'avais douze ans, sur la cou-
verture de mes livres de classe." But he made

108

INTENTIONS

the statement in no spirit of extravagance. It
seemed to him that we observe in nature what
art has taught us to see, and he chose that way
of saying so. He elaborates it delightfully, so
that people may forget he has spoken the truth.
Fogs, for example, did not exist till art had
invented them. "Now, it must be admitted,
fogs are carried to excess. They have become
the mere mannerism of a clique, and the ex-
aggerated realism of their method gives dull
people bronchitis." Then he runs on for a few
pages, illustrating these wise saws with modern
and ingenious instances of life hurrying after
fiction, reproducing the opening of " Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde," setting an unreal Becky Sharp
beside Thackeray's creation, and going so far,
indeed, as to trip up the heels of a serial story
with the sordid actuality of fact.

He discusses Zola and his no less heavy-
footed disciples, who stand for the failure of
imitation and are the best proofs that the mirror
cracks when the artist holds it up to anything
except himself. Cyril suggests that Balzac was
a realist, and Vivian quotes Baudelaire's saying,
that " his very scullions have genius," compares
him to Holbein, and points out that he is far
more real than life. "A steady course of Balzac
reduces our living friends to shadows and our
acquaintances to the shadows of shades."

109

OSCAR WILDE

Then comes an objection to modernity of
form, and some reasons for that objection that
suggest a very interesting speculation. He
thinks that Balzac's love for modernity of form
prevented him from producing any single book
that can rank with the masterpieces of romantic
art. And then: — "The public imagine that,
because they are interested in their immediate
surroundings, Art should be interested in them
also, and should take them as her subject matter.
But the mere fact that they are interested in
these things makes them an unsuitable subject
for Art. The only beautiful things, as some-
body once said, are the things that do not con-
cern us. As long as a thing is useful or
necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either
for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our
sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment
in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere
of Art." These words seemed, in 1889, to be
both daring and precarious. The influence of
philosophy is not so immediate as is sometimes
supposed. It is not extravagant to find in those
few words a reflection, direct or indirect, of
Immanuel Kant, who, writing in 1790, said that
what is called beautiful is the object of a delight
apart from any interest, and showed that charm,
or intimate reference to our own circumstances
or possible circumstances, so far from being a

110

INTENTIONS

criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence
upon our judgment. In the Preface to Dorian
Gray, that little flaunting compendium of
Wilde's aesthetics, it is easy to trace the ideas
of Kant, divested of their technical phrasing,
freed from their background of reasoning and
their foreground of accurate explanation. For
example : — " No artist desires to prove any-
thing." This balances Kant's banishment of
concepts from the beautiful. For another : —
" All art is quite useless." This balances Kant's
distinction between the beautiful and the good.
This is not the place for any worthy discussion
of the relation between the theory and the
practice of art; but it is interesting to notice
that what was temperamentally true for Wilde,
and therefore peculiarly his own, had been
logically true for a philosopher a hundred years
before. Coleridge, whose originality there is no
more need to question than Wilde's, gave Kant's
ideas a different colouring. Is it that the
philosopher is unable to apply in detail what the
artist is unable to conceive as a whole ?

It is important to remember that throughout
this dialogue, Wilde is speaking of pure art, a
thing which possibly does not exist, and, recog-
nising it as an ideal towards which all artists
should aspire, is engaged in pointing out the
more obvious means of falling short of it. He

111

OSCAR WILDE

achieves a triumph, of a kind in which he
delighted, by making people read of such a
subject. Not wishing to be laughed at by the
British intellect, and wishing to be listened to,
he laughs at it instead, and, near the end of the
dialogue, is so daring as to present it with a
picture of what is occurring, confident that the
individual will disclaim the general, and smile
without annoyance at the caricature. " The
stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands
like the Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and
fantasy, La Chimtre, dances round it and calls to
it with her false flute-toned voice." And the
individual reader did not understand, and Wilde
danced away until he felt inclined again to make
him listen to the flute-toned enunciation of un-
familiar truths.

'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' the essay on
Wainewright, not in dialogue, has some of the
hard angular outlines of the set article on book
or public character. It fills these outlines, how-
ever, with picturesque detail and half-ironic
speculation. It is impossible not to notice the
resemblance between the subject of this essay
and its author. It is difficult not to suspect
that Wilde, in setting in clear perspective
Wainewright's poisoning and writing, in esti-
mating the possible power of crime to intensify
a personality, was analysing himself, and ex-

112

INTENTIONS

pressing through a psychological account of
another man the results of that analysis. Per-
haps, in that essay we have less analysis than
hypothesis. Wilde may have happened on the
Life of Wainewright, and taken it, among all
the books he had read, as a kind of Virgilian
omen. My metaphor, as Dr. Chasuble would
say, is drawn from Virgil. It used to be
customary among those who wished to look into
the future to open the works of that poet and to
observe the lines covered by the thumb : "which
lines, if in any way applicable to one's condition,
were accounted prophetic." I think it possible
that Wilde looked upon the little account of
Wainewright that gave him a basis for his
article as just such a prophetic intimation. He
may have written the article to taste his future
before the fact. Anyhow, he foreshadows the
line of defence to be taken by his own apologists
when he exclaims that " the fact of a man being
a poisoner is nothing against his prose." In any
discussion of the influence that Wilde's disease
or crime exerted on his art, this essay would be
a valuable piece of evidence. But in other
things than the engaging in a secret activity,
Wainewright offered Wilde a curious parallel
with himself. He too introduced a new
manner in writing by a new manner in dress,
and Wilde was able to use his own emotions in
H 113

OSCAR WILDE

the presence of blue china to vitalize the piece
of Dutch painting, a Gabriel Metsu or a Jan
van Eyck, in which he paints Wainewright with
his cats, his curiosities, his crucifixes, his rare
books, his cameos, and his "brown-biscuit tea-
pots, filigree worked," against a background in
which green predominates. " He had that
curious love of green, which in individuals is
always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament,
and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a
decadence of morals." Wilde also was fond of
green. I have not counted occasions, but I
have the impression that green is the colour
most often mentioned alike in his verse and in
his prose. Green and jade : these are his key-
notes in colour, unless I am mistaken, and in
these matters impressions are less likely to err
than mathematics.

But the most striking and beautiful thing in
Intentions is that dialogue between the two
young men in a library whose windows look
over the kaleidoscopic swirl of Piccadilly to the
trees and lawns of the Green Park. They talk
through the summer night, supping delicately
on ortolans and Chambertin, and, in the early
morning, draw the curtains, see the silver ribbon
of the road, the purple mist among the trees,
and walk down to Covent Garden to look at
the roses that have come in from the country.

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INTENTIONS

There is something of Boccaccio in that setting,
something, too, of Landor in the lucid sentences
of their talk, and something of Walter Pater in
the choice of the fruit they so idly pluck from
the tree of knowledge. But Pater could not
have let their conversation change so easily from
smooth to ripple and from ripple to smooth ;
Landor would have caught the ripples and
carved them in transparent moonstone, and
Boccaccio would have given them girls to talk
of, instead of " The Critic as Artist."

That would seem to be a question for the
learned and not for two young exquisites with a
taste for music and books and an aesthetic dis-
like of the German language. But the only
critical dialogue in English literature that is at
all comparable with Wilde's is "The Impartial
Critick" of John Dennis, who was ready to
prove that choruses were unnecessary in tragedy,
that Wycherley excelled Plautus, and that
Shakespeare himself was not so bad as Thomas
Rymer had painted him. And there too we
have young men, not themselves authors, talk-
ing for pleasure's sake, drinking with discretion,
now in their lodgings, now at The Old Devil
and now at The Cock, reading aloud to each
other and commenting verse by verse on Mr.
Waller, whom they admit to be "a great
Genius and a gallant Writer." There is a

115

OSCAR WILDE

delightful savour about that dialogue, dry as
some of the questions were that those two
young sparks discussed with such wet throats.
There is a suggestion of the town outside and
the country beyond, of stage-coaches passing
through the Haymarket, and of Hampshire
gentlemen " being forbid by the perpetual Rains
to follow the daily labour of their Country
Sports," handing about their Brimmers within
doors, " as fast as if they had done it for Exer-
cise." And those young men talk with just the
fine superiority of Ernest and Gilbert to the
authordom whose rules and persons they amuse
themselves by discussing.

Ernest and Gilbert are, however, better
talkers. In fact, their talk is far too good really
to have been heard. They set their excellence
as a barrier between themselves and life. Not
for a moment will they forget that they are
the creatures of art : not for a moment will they
leave that calm air for the dust and turmoil of
human argument. Wilde was never so sure of
his art as in this dialogue, where Ernest, that
ethereal Sancho Panza, and Gilbert, that rather
languid Don Quixote, tilt for their hearer's joy.
They share the power of visualization that made
Wilde's own talk like a continuous fairy tale.
They turn their ideas into a coloured pageantry,
and all the gods of Greece and characters of art

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INTENTIONS

are ready to grace by their visible presence the
exposition, whether of the ideas that are to be
confuted or of those that are to take their place.
" In the best days of art," says Ernest, " there
were no art critics," and four pages follow in
which the sculptor releases the sleeping figures
from the marble, Phaedrus bathes his feet in the
nymph-haunted meadow, the little figures of
Tanagra are shaped with bone or wooden tool
from river clay, Artemis and her hounds are
cut upon a veined sardonyx, the wanderings of
Odysseus are stained upon the plaster, and
round the earthen wine-jar Bacchus dances and
Silenus sprawls.

"But no," says Gilbert, "the Greeks were
a nation of art- critics.0 He balances with a
sequence of ideas his friend's pageant of pictures.
The Greeks criticized language, and " Words
have not merely music as sweet as that of viol
and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that
makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian
or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure
and certain than that which reveals itself in
marble or in bronze, but thought and passion
and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed
alone. If the Greeks had criticized nothing but
language, they would still have been the great
art-critics of the world. To know the principles
of the highest art is to know the principles

117

OSCAR WILDE

of all the arts." And so the talk goes on. There
is but one defect in this panoramic method of
presenting ideas. Each time that Wilde empties,
or seems to spill before us, his wonderful cornu-
copia of coloured imagery, he seems to build a
wave that towers like the blue and silver billow
of Hokusai's print. Now, surely, it will break,
we say, and are tempted to echo Cyril in ' The
Decay of Lying,' when, at the close of one of
these miraculous paragraphs, he remarks, "I
like that. I can see it. Is that the end?"
Too many of Wilde's paragraphs are perora-
tions.

It is easy, in remembering the colour and
rhythm of this dialogue, to forget the subtlety
of its construction, the richness of its matter,
and the care that Wilde brought to the con-
sideration of his subject. 1 have pleased myself
by working out a scheme of its contents,
such as Wilde may have used in building it.
Perhaps I could have found no better method of
illustrating the qualities I have mentioned.

He begins with a story in the memoirs of an
Academician, and, without telling it, goes on
to praise autobiographies and biographies and
egotism, in order to induce a frame of mind in
the reader that shall make him ready to consider
without too much hostility a peculiarly sub-
jective form of art. He winds into his subject

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INTENTIONS

like a serpent, as Goldsmith said of Burke, by
way of music, returning to the story told by the
Academician, which is allowed to suggest a
remark on the uselessness of art-criticism. The
ideas follow in some such order as this. Bad
Criticism. The Browning Society as an ex-
ample. Browning. A swift and skilful return
to the point at issue. The Greeks not art
critics. The Greeks a nation of art critics.
Life and Literature the highest arts. Walter
Pater. Greek criticism of language and the
test of the spoken word. Blind Milton writing
by ear alone. Example of Greek criticism in
Aristotle's "Poetics." Identification of the
creative and critical faculties. All fine art is
self-conscious. Criticism as such more diffi-
cult than creation. Action and reverie. Sin
an element of progress, because it intensifies
the individuality. The world made by the
singer for the dreamer. Criticism itself art, a
form of autobiography concerned with thoughts
not events. Criticism purely subjective, and so
independent of obvious subject. For examples,
Ruskin's prose independent of his views on
Turner; Pater's description of Mona Lisa in-
dependent of the intention of Leonardo. " The
meaning of a beautiful created thing is as much
in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in
his soul who wrought it." Music. "Beauty

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OSCAR WILDE

has as many meanings as man has moods." The
highest criticism "criticizes not merely the in-
dividual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills
with wonder a form which the artist may have
left void, or not understood, or understood
incompletely." A work of art is to the critic a
suggestion for a new work of his own. Modern
painting. Too intelligible pictures do not
challenge the critic. Imitation and suggestion.
"The aesthetic critic rejects those obvious modes
of art that have but one message to deliver, and
having delivered it become dumb and sterile."
At this point, supper, with a promise to discuss
the critic as interpreter. Part II picks up the
discussion and continues. Works of art need
interpretation. A true appreciation of Milton,
for example, impossible without scholarship.
But the truth of a critic's interpretation depends
on the intensity of his own personality. All
arts have their critics. The actor a critic of the
drama. The executant a critic of the composer.
Critics " will be always showing us the work of
art in some new relation to our age." Tendency
towards finding experience in art rather than in
life. Life a failure from the artistic point of
view, if only because a moment of life can never
be lived again, whereas in literature, one can be
sure of finding the particular emotion for which
one looks. A pageantry of the things that have

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INTENTIONS

been happening in Dante for six hundred years.
Baudelaire and others. The transference of
emotion. Not through life but through art can
we realize perfection. The immorality of art.
"For emotion for the sake of emotion is the
aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action
is the aim of life, and of that practical organiza-
tion of life that we call society." A further
comparison between action and contemplation.
Ernest asks, "We exist, then, to do nothing,"
and Gilbert answers, " It is to do nothing that
the elect exist." There follows one of the few
passages that contains any outspoken mention
of a decadence. (This word was freely used as
a label in England and France at this time.)
"But we who are born at the close of this
wonderful age are at once too cultured and too
critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious
of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations
about life in exchange for life itself." "In the
development of the critical spirit we shall be
able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the
collective life of the race." Heredity, "the only
one of the gods whose real name we know," brings
gifts of strange temperaments and impossible
desires, and the power of living a thousand
lives. Imagination is "concentrated race-ex-
perience." Being and becoming compared with
doing. Defence of egotism. " The sure way of

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OSCAR WILDE

knowing nothing about life is to try to make
oneself useful." Schoolmasters. Self-culture,
not the culture of others, the proper aim of
man. The idea is dangerous : so are all ideas.
Ernest suggests that the fact that a critical work
is subjective places it below the greatest work,
which is impersonal and objective. Gilbert
replies that *'the difference between objective
and subjective work is one of external form
merely. It is accidental, not essential. All
artistic creation is absolutely subjective." Critics
not even limited to the more obviously sub-
jective forms of expression, but may use drama,
dialogues, narrative, or poetry. He then turns
more particularly to the critic's qualifications.
He must not be fair, not be rational, not be
sincere, except in his devotion to the principle
of beauty, Journalism, reviewing, and pruri-
ence. Intrusion of morals into art. Further
consideration of the critic's qualifications. Tem-
perament, its cultivation through decorative art.
A digression on modern painting, returning to
the subject of decorative art. The influence of
the critic should be the mere fact of his exist-
ence. " You must not ask of him to have any
aim other than the perfecting of himself." It is
not his business to reform bad artists, who are
probably quite irreclaimable. Remembering,
but not alluding to Whistler's attack, he lets

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INTENTIONS

Ernest ask, " But may it not be that the poet is
the best judge of poetry, and the painter of
painting?" Gilbert replies, "The appeal of all
art is simply to the artistic temperament."
Great artists unable to recognize the beauty of
work different from their own. Examples : —
Wordsworth on Keats, Shelley on Wordsworth,
Byron on all three, Sophocles on Euripides,
Milton on Shakespeare, Reynolds on Gains-
borough. The future belongs to criticism.
" The subject-matter at the disposal of creation
is always diminishing, while the subject-matter
of criticism increases daily. " The use of criticism.
It makes culture possible, makes the mind a fine
instrument, "takes the cumbersome mass of
creative work, and distils it into a finer essence."
It recreates the past. It makes us cosmopolitan.
Goethe could not hate France even during her
invasion of Germany. Comparison between
ethics and aesthetics. " To discern the beauty
of a thing is the finest point to which we can
arrive." "Creation is always behind the age.
It is Criticism that leads us." A swift summary,
with a graceful transition to the dawn and
opening windows over Piccadilly. Such is the
skeleton of thought that connects all that is
said, and, disguised by a wonderful skill, makes
even the transitions delightful, and remembers
the main purpose again and again without ever

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wearying us by allowing us to be conscious of
repetition.

But, forgetting these mechanics and listening
to that light-hearted conversation, we become
aware that we are enjoying the exposition of
a point of view without an understanding of
which Wilde would be unintelligible as either
man or writer. It does not represent him com-
pletely ; a man's points of views are as various
as his moods. But, with « The Decay of Lying,'
it does represent what was, perhaps, the domi-
nant mood of his life. The dialogues overlap,
but do not contradict each other. It can hardly
have been chance that divided them in Inten-
tions, by * Pen, Pencil, and Poison/ that reflects
the mood directly opposite, the mood in which
he delighted to see a personality express itself
in clothes, in vice, in action of any kind other
than the vivid inaction of art. It is more likely
to have been self-knowledge. For the mood
that dictated the study of Wainewright was akin
to that in which he found it an astounding ad-
venture to entertain poisonous things. " It was
like feasting with panthers ; the danger was half
the excitement." Wilde's tragedy may be
traced to the conflict between these moods, the
one inviting him to life, the other to art. In
either case, life or art matched its colours to
seduce his temperament. The mood of the

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INTENTIONS

dialogues was that in which he turned, not
necessarily always to writing, but to seek ex-
perience in art. In this mood he preferred, if
you like to put it so, to take life at second-hand,
and was happier to speak of Corot than of
twilight, of Turner than of sunset. In this
mood, like Vivian, he did not seek in Japanese
art to know Japan, but rather to learn a new
country " anywhere out of the world." Ancient
Greece did not mean to him the Peloponnesian
War, but the candour of Grecian statuary and
the small figures of Tanagra, in the folds of
whose dancing dresses, that seem always to
have caught the tint of the evening sky in their
terra-cotta, he found the secret of quite another
country than the Greece of the historian. It
was always his pleasure to begin where others
had ended, and criticism rather than creation
came to mean for him the delicate adventures
of the intellect, such a life as was the best part
of his own. And so criticism became creation
for him, building its impressions into things
beautiful in themselves, and transforming the
life of the critic into something no less delight-
ful than the subjects of his contemplation.

Such a theory of criticism had not been stated
before his time, though there had been such
critics and such criticism. The abstract usually
follows the concrete, and the practice dictates

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OSCAR WILDE

the precept. Wilde had in his mind as he
wrote such fine flaming things as Swinburne's
study of Blake, and such slow-moving mag-
nificent pageants as " Marius the Epicurean/' in
which Pater had criticized a century of manners
and ideas. And, perhaps, he did not forget his
own ' Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' that was " a
study in green," as well as a summary of the
life and talents of Janus Weathercock of The
London Magazine.

Beautiful criticism had been made as long ago
as when Sidney wrote of the "blind crowder,"
whose song moved his heart like the sound of
a trumpet. But men had not known what they
were doing, and made lovely things with quite
another purpose. Coleridge set the key for
many men's playing when he said that "the
ultimate end of criticism is much more to estab-
lish the principles of writing, than to furnish
rules how to pass judgments on what has been
written by others ; if indeed it were possible
that the two could be separated." And Mr.
Arthur Symons, who has in our own day made
fine critical things, yet says, quite humbly, that
"the aim of criticism is to distinguish what is
essential in the work of a writer," and again,
that " criticism is a valuation of forces." Hazlitt
was no further from the truth when he wrote,
in a pleasant, rather malicious article on the

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INTENTIONS

critics of his time, that "a genuine criticism
should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the light
and shade, the soul and body of a work."
Criticism, as Wilde saw it, was free to do all
these things, but had a further duty to itself.
Hazlitt, and those who read him in his own day,
thought that he was giving opinions, talking,
reflecting " the soul and body of a work " ; but
it is for himself that we read him now, and his
subjects and opinions matter little beside the
gusto and the fresh wind of the chalk downs
that make his essays things in themselves and
fit for such criticism as he liked. Waine-
wright too, who learnt from Hazlitt, "deals,"
as Wilde saw, "with his impressions of the
work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate
these impressions into words, to give, as it were,
the literary equivalent for his imaginative and
mental effect." But he did not say so, and
perhaps Walter Pater's essays were the first to
make it impossible not to recognize that criticism
was more than a series of judgments, opinions
and ideas, necessarily subordinate to the thing
criticized.

Wilde, at any rate, recognized this, and carried
passive recognition into active proclamation of a
new creed for critics. He gave them a new
creed and a new charter, and, if he had done
nothing else, would have earned a place in the

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OSCAR WILDE

history of our literature. He showed that they
were free to do all they had ever attempted, to
track the secret stream of inspiration to its
source, to work out alike the melody and
counterpoint of art, to discover its principles, to
enjoy its examples, to paint portraits, to talk
with their sitters, to enounce ideas, to catch the
fleeting sunlight and shadow of impression.
They were free to do all this, and for a creed
he taught them that criticism is itself a creative
art, perhaps the most creative of the arts, cer-
tainly an art to be practised with no less delicate
care than that of the maker of poems, the teller
of stories, the painter of pictures, the man who
captures a melody, or the man who shapes a
dream in stone.

My private predilections may have led me to
lay too much emphasis on the main contention
of 'The Critic as Artist.' I hope not, but
must take this opportunity of remembering
that, like * The Decay of Lying,' this dialogue
is rich in other matter than theory. Wilde
never, unless in the essay on Wainewright,
deliberately set himself to estimate an artist
or to paint a portrait. But throughout the
two dialogues are scattered fragments of vivid
criticism, sometimes a little swift and careless,
always subordinated as notes of colour to the
prevailing scheme of the whole, but never

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INTENTIONS

impersonal or dull. It is impossible to read
a page of Intentions without experiencing a
delightful stimulus. It is, in my opinion,
that one of Wilde's books that most nearly
represents him. In nothing else that he
wrote did he come so near to pouring into
literature the elixir of intellectual vitality that
he royally spilled over his conversation.

The fourth essay in the book is not on the
high level of the others. It is more practical
and less beautiful, was written earlier than the
rest, and published in the year after Wilde's
marriage. It is interesting, but less as a thing
in itself than as an indication of the character of
Wilde's knowledge of the theatre. I have there-
fore passed it over to the next chapter.

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VII
THE THEATRE

THERE is a public glory in the art of the theatre,
a direct and immediate applause that is nearer
to the face-to-face praise and visible worship
that is won by conversation than the discreet
approval of readers of books. Of all the arts
that of the drama is most likely to attract the
talker for talk's sake. By its means he can set
his fancies moving on the boards, fling his
metaphors dressed and coloured on a monstrous
screen, and entertain a thousand listeners at
once. Hazlitt never wrote a play ; but his was
talk with a purpose. He talked to learn, to
teach, to think aloud. But Lamb, who talked
for the delight of himself and his friends, tried
to amuse a larger audience with " Mr. H.,"
and, when that play was damned, joined heartily
in the hisses, for fear of being mistaken for the
author. Those who conspired at the Mermaid
Tavern to send brave argosies of wit trafficking
on a bluer sea than ever sailed Drake's galleons
were playwrights to a man. Particularly the
theatre attracts those dandies among authors and
talkers, for whom social means as much as artistic

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success — Steele, Congreve, Wilde. Congreve,
like Wilde, went to Trinity College, Dublin
(though he was not an Irishman), came to
London with but little money, was a public
character before he was twenty-five, cared as
much for society as for art, grew fat with
success, and became a gentleman of the world.
The differences between his comedies and
Wilde's are not due to different aims in writing,
but only to differences in their personalities,
and to the change in public taste during the two
centuries that passed between " Love for Love "
and The Importance of Being Earnest. Not
until Congreve had had three plays successfully
acted did he write one of which " but little . . .
was prepared for that general taste which seems
now to be predominant in the palates of our
audience."

It is important in considering Wilde's early
comedies to remember the character of the
audience with which he had to contend. His
was a public that asked to feel as well as to
smile, a public that had grown accustomed
to smile with tears in its eyes, a public that was
best pleased to laugh loudly and to sob into
handkerchiefs, and judged a play by theloudness
of the laughs and the number of the handker-
chiefs that it made necessary. He had not a
Restoration audience of men and women with

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OSCAR WILDE

sharpened wits and a delight in their exercise,
ready to smile and quite unready to take any-
thing seriously except amusement. It is for
that reason that he called Lady Windermcres
Fan " A Play about a Good Woman," instead
of making Mrs. Erlynne a Sylvia and punishing
Lord Darlington with a marriage.

The spectacular effects of the theatre, the
possibilities of delightful dialogue, the public
glory, of which he was always rather greedy,
drew Wilde to the writing of plays. But be-
side these less intimate motives he had a genuine
dramatic instinct that kept him from his early
youth intermittently preparing himself as a play-
wright. The first thing he wrote after the
publication of Poems was a play. He took it
with him to America, and on his return wrote
another. With the charming braggadocio of
one who was quite determined that there should
be an Op. XXX. he printed Op. II. on the title-
page of the private issue of The Duchess of
Padua. His public recognition as a playwright
was deferred till 1892, but after the writing
of Vera, which, I suppose, was Op. I., he
seldom ceased to observe and to plan for the
stage.

The character of Wilde's study of the theatre
was shown in 'The Truth of Masks,' and in
the dramatic criticism that he wrote in the years

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immediately following his marriage. It was a
study of methods and concerned no less with
stage-management than with the drama. Nearly
thirty years ago he made a plea for beautiful
scenery, and asked for that harmony between
costumier and scene-painter that has been
achieved in our day by Charles Ricketts and
Cayley Robinson under the management of
Mr. Herbert Trench. He remarked that painted
doors were superior to real ones, and pointed out
that properties which need light from more than
one side destroy the illumination suggested by
the scene-painter's shadings. From the first his
dramatic criticism was written in the wings, not
from the point of view of an audience careless
of means, observant only of effects. Vera may
have been dull, and The Duchess of Padua un-
playable, but actors, at least, shall have no fault
to find in the technique of Lady Wiudermere's
Fan. That play seems to me to be no more
than a conscious experiment in the use of the
knowledge that Wilde had sedulously worked
to obtain.

There was a continuity in Wilde's interest
in the theatre wholly lacking in his passing
fancies for narrative or essay-writing. This,
with the fact that his plays brought him his first
financial success, has made it usual to consider
him as a dramatist whose recreations are repre-

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OSCAR WILDE

sented by his books. Even Mr. Symons, in his
article on Wilde as "An Artist in Attitudes,"
finds that his plays, " the wittiest that have been
seen upon the modern stage," expressed, " as it
happened by accident, precisely what he himself
was best able to express." I cannot help feeling
that this is a little unjust to him. His most
perfectly successful works, those which most
exactly accomplish what they attempt, without
sacrificing any part of themselves, are, perhaps,
The Importance of Being Earnest and Salome.
Both these are plays. But neither of them
seems to me so characteristic, so inclusive of
Wilde as Intentions, De Profundis, The Portrait
of Mr. W. ff.9 or even The Picture of' Dorian
Gray. His plays are wilfully limited, subordi-
nated to an aim outside themselves, and, except
in the two I have just mentioned, these limita-
tions are not such as to justify themselves by
giving freedom to the artist. Some limitations
set an artist free for an achievement otherwise
impossible. But the limitations of which I
complain only made Wilde a little contemp-
tuous of his work. They did not save his talent
from preoccupations, but compelled it to a
labour in whose success alone he could take an
interest.

It is impossible not to feel that Wilde was
impatient of the methods and the meanings of

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his first three successful plays, like a juggler,
conscious of being able to toss up six balls, who
is admired for tossing three. These good women,
these unselfish, pseudonymous mothers, these
men of wit and fashion discomfited to make
a British holiday ; their temptations, their sacri-
fices, their defeats, are not taken from any drama
played in Wilde's own mind. He saw them
and their adventures quite impersonally ; and
no good art is impersonal. Salome kissing the
pale lips of lokanaan may once have moved
him when he saw her behind the ghostly foot-
lights of that secret theatre in which each man
is his own dramatist, his own stage-manager,
and his own audience. But Lady Windermere
did not return to her husband for Wilde's sake,
and he did not feel that Sir Robert Chiltern's
future mattered either way. He cared only
that an audience he despised should be relieved
at her return, and that to them the career of
a politician should seem to be important. Not
until the production of The Importance of Being
Earnest did he share the pleasure of the pit.
I know a travelling showman who makes " en-
joy " an active verb, and speaks of " enjoying
the poor folk " when, for coppers, he lets them
ride on merry-go-rounds, and agitate themselves
in swing-boats, which offer him no manner of
amusement. In just this way Wilde " enjoyed "

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OSCAR WILDE

the London audiences with his early plays. He
did not enjoy them himself.

Hazlitt said of Congreve that " the work-
manship overlays the materials ; in Wycherley
the casting of the parts and the fable are alone
sufficient to ensure success." Wilde may not
have read Hazlitt on " The English Comic
Writers," but his earlier plays suggest a deter-
mination to "ensure success" after the manner
of Wycherley, and to overlay the base material
necessary for that purpose with wit's fine work-
manship after the manner of Congreve. The
fables, the characters, the settings, were chosen
on account of their experience ; all were veterans
with reputations untarnished by any failure in
popularity. Some were taken from the English
stage, some from the French ; all served as the
machinery to keep an audience interested and
carry Wilde's voice across the footlights. In
the theatre, as in storytelling, he was not un-
ready to work to bouts-rimes.

I say, to carry Wilde's voice across the foot-
lights : that is exactly what his plays do. Those
neat, polished sentences, snapping like snuff-
boxes, are often taken from the books that hold
what he chose to preserve of his conversation.
An aphorism that has served the author of
The Soul of Man and shone for a moment in
Dorian Gray is given a new vitality by Lord

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Illingworth, and what is good enough for Lady
Narborough is a little better in the mouth of
Dumby. Wilde was never without the power,
shared by all amateurs of genius, of using up
the odds and ends from one pastime to fill out
the detail of another. Doing things, like
Merime'e, for wagers with himself, he would make
plays that should be powerful in their effect on
other people, but he would reserve the right to
show, even while making them, that he could
do something else. He learnt from Musset,
and believed, with Fortunio, that " a pun is
a consolation for many ills, and a play upon
words as good a way as another of playing with
thoughts, actions, and people." He consoled
himself for his plots by taking extraordinary
liberties with them, and amused himself with
quips, bons-mots, epigrams and repartee that
had really nothing to do with the business in
hand. Most of his witty sayings would bear
transplanting from one play to another, and it
is necessary to consult the book if we would
remember in whose mouth they were placed.
This is a very different thing from the dialogue
of Congreve on the one hand or of J. M. Synge
on the other. The whole arrangement in con-
versation, as he might appropriately have called
either Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Hus-
band, or A Woman of No Importance, was very

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OSCAR WILDE

much lighter than the story that served as its
excuse and sometimes rudely interrupted it. It
was so sparkling, good-humoured and novel that
even the audience for whom he had constructed
the story forgave him for putting a brake upon
its speed with this quite separate verbal enter-
tainment.

I suppose that this forgiveness encouraged
him to believe that the situations and emotional
appeals he borrowed from melodrama were not
necessary to his success. In The Importance of
Being Earnest he threw them bravely over-
board, and wrote a play whose very foundation
was a pun. Nothing could be a better proof of
the inessential nature of those tricks with which
he had been making sure of his audience than
the immense superiority of this play to the
others. Free from the necessity of living up to
any drama more serious than its conversation, it
preserves a unity of feeling and of tone that sets
it upon a higher level. Wit is a little heartless,
a little jarring, when flashed over a crisis of con-
science, even when we know that the agitated
politician is only a figure cut from an illustrated
paper and mounted on cardboard. And passion,
whether of repentance or of indignation, is a
little outre in a picture-gallery where Lord
Illingworth has said that a well-tied tie is the
first serious step in life. In those first three

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plays, even when Wilde makes a serious effort
to get dramatic value out of, for example, the
Lord Illingworth's worldly wisdom, he is quite
unable to disguise the fact that it is an effort
and serious. Those plays are interesting, amus-
ing, clever, what you will, but their contradic-
tions have cost them beauty. It is not in the
least surprising that The Importance of Being
Earnest, the most trivial of the social plays,
should be the only one of them that gives that
peculiar exhilaration of spirit by which we recog-
nise the beautiful. It is precisely because it is
consistently trivial that it is not ugly. If only
once it marred its triviality with a bruise of pas-
sion, its beauty would vanish with the blow.
But it never contradicts itself, and it is worth
noticing that its unity, its dovetailing of
dialogue and plot, so that the one helps the
other, is not achieved at the expense of the con-
versation, but at that of the mechanical con-
trivances for filling a theatre that Wilde had
not at first felt sure of being able to do with-
out. The dialogue has not been weighted to
trudge with the plot ; the plot has been lightened
till it can fly with the wings of the dialogue.
The two are become one, and the lambent
laughter of this comedy is due to the radio-
activity of the thing itself, and not to glow-
worms incongruously stuck over its surface.

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OSCAR WILDE

It is not easy to define the quality of that
laughter. It is not uproarious enough to pro-
vide the sore throat of farce. It is not thought-
ful enough to pass Meredith's test of comedy.
It is not due to a sense of superior intellect, like
much of Mr. Shaw's. It is the laughter of com-
plicity. We do not laugh at but with the
persons of the play. We would, if we could,
abet the duplicity of Mr. Worthing, and be
accessories after the fact to the Bunburying of
Algernon. We would even encourage Lady
Bracknell's determined statement, for we are in
the secret, and we know —

She only does it to amuse,
Because she knows it pleases.

The simultaneous speech of Cecily and Gwen-
dolen is no insult to our intelligence, nor do we
boggle for a moment over the delightful impossi-
bility of Lane. We are caught from the begin-
ning by a spirit of delicate fun. We busy our-
selves in the intrigues, and would on no account
draw back. The Importance of Being Earnest
is to solid comedy what filigree is to a silver
bowl. We are relieved of our corporeal enve-
lopes, and share with Wilde the pleasure of
sporting in the fourth dimension.

• • • • •

Nothing better illustrates Wilde's extraordi-
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nary versatility than his almost simultaneous
business as two entirely different dramatists.
The one wrote the plays we have been discuss-
ing, the other, plays so different from these in
character that it is hard to believe that they are
the work of the same man. These other plays
have been called " romantic," a word that hardly
distinguishes them from the " romantic " comedy
of The Importance of Being Earnest. Still,
Gautier and Flaubert have made it possible
to attribute to that word a flavour of the South
and the East, and these plays have Southern
and Eastern settings that are harmonious with
their contents. There is no laughter in these
plays. They are nearer to The Duchess of
Padua than to comedy. Wilde delighted in
laughter, but also in a quality in emotion almost
hostile to laughter, a quality that I can best de-
scribe as magnificence. In his prose books both
are expressed ; if his dramatic writing had been
limited to the four plays that brought him
success, it would have seemed that the Wilde
who wrote The Sphinx had not been repre-
sented on the stage.

But, when he was writing Lady Windermere's
Fan, or a little earlier, he wrote down, swiftly,
as if to relieve himself, a play whose mood was
at the opposite end of his range. And, while
The Importance of Being Earnest was filling the

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OSCAR WILDE

St. James's Theatre, he was trying to finish
La Sainte Courtisane, and had submitted to
a manager the latter part of A Florentine
Tragedy, which he had never been able to
begin. When he was released from prison,
he left the manuscript of the first in a cab, and
did not complete the second. He had imagined,
while in Reading Gaol, two other such plays
as Salome — Ahab and Isabel, and Pharaoh.
These, unfortunately, like The Cardinal of
Arragon, portions of which Wilde was accus-
tomed to recite, were never written. The non-
existence and the incompleteness of these plays
are explicable on other grounds than those of
inclination. I think that if Salome had been
produced with success as soon as it was written,
Wilde would very likely not have written his
plays about good women and conscience-stricken
men of State, or, having written one, would have
written no more. It is possible that we owe The
Importance of Being Earnest to the fact that the
Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from playing
Salome at the Palace Theatre. For though
Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter,
he preferred to think of himself as a person with
magnificent dreams. He would rather have been
a magician than a jester. The well-dressed
modern plays starved too many of his intimate
desires. He was unable to clothe magnificent

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emotions in evening dress. But applause was
necessary to him. He made sure of it by the
modern plays, and had not a chance of securing
it by anything else. And so there are four
social comedies, and only one Salome.

Of the unfinished plays, as they are printed in
his works, there is little to be said. La Saint e
Courtisane is a beautiful fragment, suggesting a
story rather intellectual than emotional, but an
admirable framework on which to drape a cloak
of imagery. The motive is the same as that of
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. The woman covered
with jewels is converted by the hermit to the
love of God, and he by her to the love of the
flesh. They lose their own beliefs in imparting
them, and the hermit goes to Alexandria, while
the woman remains in the desert. The dialogue
is of the same character as that of Salome, which
we shall presently discuss. We cannot tell how
fine a play it might have been. The Florentine
Tragedy is less fragmentary. As Wilde left it,
it was the latter part of a play in one act in
blank verse, beginning with the surprisal of the
lovers by the husband. The whole of the conver-
sation between the three had been written. To fit
the play for presentation on the stage, Mr. Sturge
Moore wrote a preparation for it that cannot be
far different from Wilde's design, and is now
printed with the rest. It is not the business of

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OSCAR WILDE

this book to consider the brilliant and vigorous
poetry of Mr. Sturge Moore, though it is
impossible not to remember with delight
passages frosti many of his books, always rich
in ore, and again and again melting into purest
gold. His induction to Wilde's play is perfectly
calculated. He catches the spirit of Wilde's
verse, and subdues his own to agreement. His is
the difficult task of so drawing Bianca's charac-
ter that she shall be able without incongruity to
beg the young lord to kill her husband, and,
when the young lord is himself killed, to come
dazed towards the merchant she has despised,
with the question —

"Why
Did you not tell me you were so strong?"

and receive the answer —

"Why
Did you not tell me you were beautiful ? "

Wilde's is a piece of cumulative drama that
keeps up an increasing tension in the audience
from the moment that the husband enters till
the moment when the lover dies and those two
sentences are spoken. The play resembles The
Duchess of Padua in being unable to disguise an
aloof intention, an extraneous will-power, that
is perfectly hidden in the earlier Salome.

It is surprising to think that Salome was not
written with a view to production. It was only

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offered to Sarah Bernhardt when she asked
Wilde why he had not written a play for her.
The stage-directions, I am told, set almost in-
soluble problems to the manager, whose ideas
are limited by the conventions of the modern
theatre. The final speech of Salome' is of a
length that demands, if abridgment is to be
avoided, a consummate actress and an audience
in a state of extraordinary tension. But, since
the play induces such a tension, the lack of an
actress can hardly be urged as a blemish on its
technique. And since, when the play is pro-
duced it is extremely successful, we can only
rejoice that it has shown, if only accidentally,
the inadequacy of once accepted dogmas of
theatrical presentation. An appeal to the
populace is not good criticism, but no badly
built play can show such a record of success
as Salome. Mr. Ross will, I am sure, allow
me to use some of the heavy fire of facts with
which he answered those critics who spoke of
the play as having been "dragged from ob-
scurity " when it was produced in England in
1905. " In 1901, within a year of the author's
death, it was produced in Berlin; from that
moment it has held the European stage. It
has run for a longer consecutive period in Ger-
many than any play by any Englishman, not
excepting Shakespeare. Its popularity has ex-
it 145

OSCAR WILDE

tended to all countries where it is not prohibited.
It is performed throughout Europe, Asia, and
America. It is played even in Yiddish."

But before discussing the play itself let me
set down the facts on both sides of the mild
controversy over the writing of it in French.
Wilde had talked of the play for some time
before he wrote it, and talked of it chiefly in
Paris. Frenchmen had applauded the fragments
he recited. It was to them that he wished to
show it when completed. This is the reason
why it shares with " Vathek " and " The Gram-
mont Memoirs " the distinction of being a work
written in French by an English-speaking man
of genius. It has been suggested that the lan-
guage made it possible, but La Sainte Courtisane
is enough to show that it could have been
written in English. There are slight disagree-
ments over Wilde's knowledge of French. M.
Andre Gide says that "he knew French ad-
mirably, but pretended to have to look for the
words for which he meant his listeners to wait.
He had almost no accent, or at most only what
it pleased him to retain to give a new and
strange aspect to his words." On the other
hand, M. Stuart Merrill writes of his speaking
French with a fantasy that, pleasant enough in
conversation, would have produced a deplorable
impression in the theatre. For example, Wilde

146

THE THEATRE

ended one of his stories with " Et puis, alors,
le roi ilest mouru."

These pieces of evidence must be remembered
when we consider the composition of Salome.
Mr. Ross says : " The play was passed for press
by no less a writer than Marcel Schwob, whose
letter to the Paris publisher, returning the
proofs and mentioning two or three slight altera-
tions, is still in my possession. Marcel Schwob
told me some years afterwards that he thought
it would have spoiled the spontaneity and
character of Wilde's style if he had tried to
harmonize it with the diction demanded by the
French Academy." M. Merrill says : " Un
jour Wilde me remit son drame qu'il avait ecrit
tr&s rapidement, de premier jet, en fra^ais, et
me demanda d'en corriger les erreurs manifestes.
Ce ne fut pas chose facile de faire accepter a
Wilde toutes mes corrections. . . . Je me rap-
pelle que la plupart des tirades de ses personnages
commencaient par 1'expletif: enfin! En ai-je
assez biffe, des enfin! Mais je m'apercus bientot
que le bon Wilde n'avait en mon gout qu'une
confiance relative, et je le recommandai aux
soins de Rette. Celui-ci continua mon travail
de correction et d'emendation. Mais Wilde finit
par se mefier de Rettd autant que de moi, et ce
fut Pierre Louys qui donna le dernier coup de
lime au texte de Salome" In comment, I shall

147

OSCAR WILDE

do no more than notice that the play was written
in 1891, and not published till 1893. The two
stories do not necessarily contradict each other,
for Marcel Schwob did not suggest that he saw
the manuscript, and M. Merrill's reminiscence
is concerned with Salome long before it was
sent to the printers.

The question is not one of any great import-
ance. It is sufficient for our purpose to observe
that the French of Salome, whether as Wilde
wrote it or as it survived the emendations of his
friends, is very simple in construction. Salome,
daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea, did
not use the finer subtleties of the language in
which she loved lokanaan. A perusal of Maeter-
linck's " Les Sept Princesses " had taught her to
use a speech whose power depends on its simpli-
city. She, Herod, Herodias and all their en-
tourage, speak like children who have had a
French nurse. Their speech is made of short
sentences, direct assertions and negations, that
run like pages beside the progress of the play.
They show, these short sentences, what is
happening, the more forcefully, because they are
themselves aloof from it and busied with their
own concerns. For example : —

" Herode. Qu'est-ce que cela me fait qu'elle danse ou
non ? Cela ne me fait rien. Je suis heureux ce soir. Je
suis tres heureux. Jamais je n'ai ete si heureux.

148

THE THEATRE

Le premier soldat. II a Tair sombre, le tetrarque. N'est-
ce pas qu'il a Fair sombre ?

Le second soldat. II a 1'air sombre."

The effect of the play is won by the cumu-
lative weight of these short contradictory
sentences, that fall like continual drops of water
on a stone, never argue, are never loud enough
to be quarrelsome, and sometimes amuse them-
selves by reflecting, as if in a box of mirrors,
a single object in a hundred ways. The moon is
translated into many moods. For the page of
Herodias she is a dead woman coming from the
tomb to look for dead men. Salome's lover
sees her as a little dancing princess, with yellow
veil and silver feet. For Salome she is a little
piece of money, cold, chaste, a virgin. The page
of Herodias sees her again as a dead woman,
covering herself with a winding-sheet, and when
the young Syrian dies, laments that, knowing
she was seeking a dead man, he had not hidden
his friend in a cavern where she could not see
him. Herod finds her an hysterical woman
seeking lovers everywhere, naked, and refusing
to be veiled by the clouds. Herodias finds that
the moon resembles the moon, and that is all.
Then in the eyes of Herod she becomes red in
accordance with the prophecy, and Herodias re-
plies, jeering, " And the Kings of the Earth
have fear." And finally, when Salome is speak-

149

OSCAR WILDE

ing to the head, when all is over but her death,
Herod cries aloud that the moon should be put
out with the torches and the stars, because he
begins to be afraid.

The drama, reflected in these images of the
moon that show the changing colours of the
minds that look at her, is thrown inward, and
must be read between the lines. Rather than
describe the strength of an emotion, or show it in
immediate action, Wilde shows what it compels
its possessor to disregard. Salome' answers the
question of the young Syrian with irrelevant
remarks, because she is obsessed by the mole's
eyes of her stepfather. When lokanaan speaks,
and the young Syrian suggests that she should
go into the garden in her litter, she replies
simply, " II dit des choses monstrueuses a propos
de ma mere, n'est-ce pas ? " When he kills him-
self, on account of her words to the prophet,
and falls before her feet, she does not see him.
The page laments, and a soldier tells her of what
has happened before her eyes : —

" Le premier soldat. Princesse, le jeune capitaine vient de
se tuer.

Salome. Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche, lokanaan."

This is potential as opposed to kinetic drama,
and expresses itself not in action, but in being
unmoved by action. It is an expression of
the aspiration towards purely potential speech

150

THE THEATRE

characteristic of the French symbolists, and of
all who seek " a literature in which the visible
world is no longer a reality, and the unseen
world no longer a dream." It was, perhaps, the
fear that such drama of the mind would be im-
possible on the stage that made Maeterlinck
write as sub-title to a book of plays, "Little
Dramas for Marionettes." For the speech
maps out by avoidance what is really said, and
whereas some plays would lose little by being
acted in dumb show, these appeal less to the eye
than to the ear.

In writing Salome, however, Wilde did not
neglect the wonderful visual sense of the theatre
that was, later, to suggest to him the appearance
on the stage of Jack in mourning for his non-
existent brother. He was able to see the play
from the point of view of the audience, and re-
fused no means of intensifying its effect. When
Salome is leaning over the cistern, listening for
the death of lokanaan, he does not allow the
executioner to come up with the head. The
man would have shared the attention of the
audience, and made the head a piece of meat.
Instead : " Un grand bras noir, le bras du
bourreau, sort de la citerne apportant sur un
bouclier d'argent la tete d'lokanaan. Salome la
saisit. Herode se cache le visage avec son
manteau. Herodias sourit et s'evente. Les

151

OSCAR WILDE

Nazareens s'agenouillent et commencent a prier."
The head, like a dramatic moment, isolated
upon the stage, compels a group of characteristic
actions. Its appearance is a significant speech.
The strength of the emotion in the play blinds
many to the beauty without which it would be
worthless. Salome's lust, wreaking itself on
dead lips because it was denied them living, is,
indeed, a powerful demon to subdue to the ser-
vice of beauty. And the prurient, who are
most intimately moved by it, make up most
of those who cannot see beyond it. But this
emotion is but part of a larger harmony, which,
though still more powerful, is not allowed to
confuse the delicate, careful fingering of the
artist. Control is never lost, and, when the
play is, done, when we return to it in our wak-
ing dreams, we return to that elevation only
given by the beautiful, undisturbed by the vivid-
ness, the clearness with which we realise the
motive of passion playing its part in that deeper
motive of doom, that fills the room in which we
read, or the theatre in which we listen, with the
beating of the wings of the angel of death.

152

VIII
DISASTER

BEFORE the success of the plays, Wilde had
been an adventurer on thin ice, exhibiting a
brave superiority to fortune, but painfully con-
scious that his income was far smaller than that
on which it was possible to live with the happy
extravagance that was natural to him. He had
been born with the ghost of a silver spoon in his
mouth, but had never been able to materialize
it. It was his right to live luxuriously, since
that task was one that he was peculiarly fitted
to perform. Some carelessness in the inviting
of his fairy godmothers, some inattention on the
part of the presiding gods, had denied him that
right. When the success of the plays suddenly
raised his income to several thousands of pounds
a year, he lost no time in living up to and above
it. Some of his extravagances were of the
simplest, most childish kind. He over-fed, like
a schoolboy in a tuckshop with an unexpected
sovereign in his hand. Flowers he had always
worn, hansom-cabs he had always used, but now
he bought the most expensive button-holes, and
kept his cab waiting all day. His friendships

153

OSCAR WILDE

became proportionately costly, for he denied
nothing to those he liked, and some of them
never forgot to ask. He hurriedly ruined him-
self with prosperity, like the poor man in the
fairy tale, whose wish for all the gold in the
world was granted by a mischievous destiny.

The success of the plays and the extravagance
that it permitted placed him in so strong a light
of public attention that he could do nothing in
secret. He became one of those people whose
celebrity lends a savour to gossip. Scandal
borrowed wings from the knowledge that it had
a beginning in truth. In 1889, before the malefi-
cent flood of gold was poured upon him, he had
become accustomed to indulge the vice that,
openly alluded to in the days and verses of
Catullus, is generally abhorred and hidden in
our own. He had been in youth a runner after
girls, but, as a man, he ceased to take any in-
terest in women. In the moment of his success,
when many were ready to throw themselves at
his feet, one, perhaps, of the reasons of his power
was his own indifference to his conquests. Many
excuses have been made for him. It has been
suggested, for example, that in his absorption in
antiquity he allowed himself to forget that he
was not living in it. But Wilde was not a
scholar with a rampart of books between him-
self and the present. Our business here is scien-

154

DISASTER

tific, not apologetic, and such evidence as we
have shows that the vice needs none but a
pathological explanation. It was a disease, a
malady of the brain, not the necessary con-
sequence of a delight in classical literature.
Opulence permitted its utmost development,
but did not create it. Opulence did, however,
make it noticeable, and prepared the circum-
stances in which it was publicly punished.

Wilde had always been laughed at, and, even
before the facts of his conduct were generally
known, the laughter was coloured by dislike.
A book that was written by a small, prehensile
mind, gifted with a limber cleverness, enables
us to see him through the eyes of the early
nineties. This book, "The Green Carnation,"
is a limited but faithful caricature. Wilde was
accused of having written it, but characteris-
tically replied : " I invented that magnificent
flower. But with the middle-class and mediocre
book that usurps its strangely beautiful name,
I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever
to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is
not. " Here, as in the matter of " Patience," he
could not forgo the perversity of lending colour
to other people's parodies of himself. "The
Green Carnation " shows us Esme Amarinth and
a youthful patrician who models himself upon
him expounding the art of being self-consciously

155

OSCAR WILDE

foolish, wearing green carnations, and teaching
choir-boys to sing a catch about "rose-white
youth" in the presence of the widow of a
strong and silent British soldier. Lady Locke
thinks that England has changed, and though
fascinated by Amarinth's under-study, does not
marry him, for fear her " soldier's son, " a stout
Jehu of the governess-cart, should learn from
him a soul-destroying and effeminate love of
carnations pickled in arsenic. This book is like
a clever statue, brightly painted, of Britannia
refusing the advances of the aesthete. The
aesthete is made to look rather a fool; and
so is Britannia. Such sections of the public as
took pleasure in it thought Wilde a peculiarly
arrogant coxcomb, a disconcerting and polished
reply to the Victorian tradition of muscular man-
hood in which they had long been secure. They
were ready to rejoice in his discomfiture, and their
hostility to Wilde spread swiftly and gave a
quality of triumph to the delight of all classes as
soon as he was arrested.

An elaborate account of the various trials
would in no way serve the purpose of this book.
It is sufficient to say that on May 25, 1895, he
was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with
hard labour.

156

IX
DE PROFUNDIS

THE book called De Prof unfits, first published
in 1905, five years after Wilde's death, is not
printed as it was written, but is composed of
passages from a long letter whose complete pub-
lication would be impossible in this generation.
The passages were selected and put together by
Mr. Robert Ross with a skill that it is impos-
sible sufficiently to admire. The letter, a manu-
script of " eighty close-written pages on twenty
folio sheets," was not addressed to Mr. Ross
but to a man to whom Wilde felt that he
owed some, at least, of the circumstances of
his public disgrace. It was begun as a rebuke
of this friend, whose actions, even subsequent to
the trials, had been such as to cause Wilde con-
siderable pain. It was not delivered to him, but
given to Mr. Ross by Wilde, who also gave
instructions as to its partial publication.

It is not often possible to detect the original
intention of rebuke in the published portions
of De Profundis. I suppose that as Wilde
pointed out his friend's share in his disaster,
and set down on paper what that disaster was,

157

OSCAR WILDE

he came to examine its ulterior effect on his
own mind, for those pages that are open to us
contain such an examination. He is in prison,
and is at pains to realize exactly what this
means to him: where he is unchanged, where
he has lost, and where and how he has gained.
He would draw up a profit and loss account, of
the loaves that are sustenance for the body and
the flowers of the white narcissus that are food'
for the soul, and in this way give himself
courage to face the world with the knowledge
that he had kept his soul alive. He will dis-
cover where he stands with regard to Christi-
anity, and where with regard to Flaubert. A
critic and artist, he will realize himself among
masterpieces, and discover what is altered in the
personality for whose notation he has been ac-
customed to use his criticism of works of art.
"To the artist, expression is the only mode
under which he can conceive life at all. To
him what is dumb is dead."

Wilde's life in prison was lived on two planes.
Only one of them is represented in De Pro-
fundis. In writing that letter he was able to
pick up the frayed threads of his intellectual
existence, to find that some were gold and
some were crimson, and to learn that whatever
else he might have lost he had not lost his lord-
ship over words. The existence whose threads

158

DE PROFUNDIS

he thus collected was not that which was at the
moment determining the further development
of his character. It was an aftermath of that
summer of the intellect that had given him
Intentions. Instead of the debonair personality
of an Ernest or a Gilbert, he painted now a no
less ideal vision of himself in circumstances
similar to those that now surrounded him.

Behind this imaginary and as it were dramatic
life was another in which he shared the days and
the day's business of his fellow convicts.

" We tore the tarry rope to shreds

With blunt and bleeding nails ;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors

And cleaned the shining rails :
And rank by rank, we soaped the plank,

And clattered with the pails."

There was the routine of the prison, the daily
walk for one hour round a circular path, watched
by warders, inside a wall that hid all but the sky
and the topmost branches of a tree, upon whose
bare twigs, buds, and green and ruddy leaves, the
prisoners depended for news of the magnificent
passage of the seasons. These daily walks, like
all the work of the prison, took place in silence,
broken only by the warders' words of command
delivered in the raucous voice that tradition has
dictated. As speech is the greatest of man's
privileges, so its deprivation is the least bearable

159

OSCAR WILDE

of his punishments. During the daily walks
even those convicts who in other things are
obedient to the prison discipline, learn to speak
without a perceptible motion of the lips. For
six weeks Wilde walked in silence, but one
evening at the end of that time, he heard the
man walking behind him say : " Oscar Wilde,
I am sorry for you. It must be worse for you
than for us." He nearly fainted, and replied :
" No ; it's the same for all of us." In this
way he made the acquaintanceship of his fellows.
One by one he talked with all of them, and
these scraps of conversation, he told M. Andrd
Gide, made his life so far tolerable that he lost
his first desire of killing himself. "The only
humanizing influence in prison is the prisoners,"
he wrote after he came out. Except in the
matter of permission to write (a permission
not granted until near the end of his term, and
then only on the recommendation of the doctor),
the prison discipline was in no way relaxed for
Wilde. He slept on a plank bed. He did not,
like Wainewright, remain "a gentleman," and
share a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep,
neither of whom ever offered him the brush.
He cleaned out his cell, polished his tin drinking
cup, turned the crank, and picked the oakum
like the rest.

Echoes of these things are heard in De Pro-
160

DE PROFUNDIS

fwidis, but if, as Wilde had, we have made
ourselves

" Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage,"

it is not in what books say but in their style
that we look for the secrets of their writers.
And it is impossible not to notice that the
character of Wilde's prose in this book is not
very different from that in Intentions. He
observed changes in himself, and foresaw others,
but the real alteration of his point of view was
not accomplished until he came out of prison.
In gaol he was in retreat, like a man who has
gone into a monastery. The world was still
the world that he had left, and not until he was
again free did he realize more vividly than by
speculation how different his life was to be, and
across what a gulf he would look back at the
existence that had been broken off by his
disaster. His artistic attitude had not yet been
changed.

It is for this reason that the book raises so
easily a question dear to those who prefer prais-
ing or blaming to understanding. Is it sincere ?
they ask. Is it possible that a man who felt
such things sincerely could write of his feelings
in such mellifluous prose ? Is it sincere ? they
ask, with particular insistence, pointing to the
L 161

OSCAR WILDE

character of Wilde's life after leaving prison as
a proof that it was not. And if not, what then ?
Why then, they say, it is worthless.

" Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learnt aught else the least
That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs !
What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ;
And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel-pipes of wretched straw."

They demand that the truth shall be told in
a hoarse voice, that they may recognize it, and
yet the ugly, conscientious noise of their scran-
nel-pipes is no nearer than De Profundis to the
sincerity they admire. Sincerity, in the sense
that they give to that word, does not exist in
art. "What people call insincerity is simply
a method by which we can multiply our per-
sonalities." That sentence, from the mouth of
one of the personalities that Wilde was able to
assume, explains the obvious variety of his work.
It throws also no dubious light upon the general
nature of art. For in art no attitude is insin-
cere whose result is beautiful, and no attitude
is possible whose result may not be beautiful.
All depends on the artist and on the depth and
abandon of his insincerity. For art tolerates
many contradictions, but a work of art tolerates
none. The man who takes an attitude and is

162

DE PROFUNDIS

unable to sustain it, who smirks at the audience,
who plays as it were the traitor to his own
choice, can produce nothing but what is ugly,
since, like him, it will contain a contradiction.
But the man who chooses an attitude, and pre-
serves it consistently in any work of art, is
thereby fulfilling a condition of beauty. He
may make a lovely thing, and then, taking
another attitude, may contradict himself in a
thing of no less loveliness. Repentance like that
in De Profundis is a guarantee of a moment
of humility, but not of a life of reform.
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet's soliloquy and also
Juliet's murmuring from the balcony. Yet he
was not always in love, nor always melancholy
with inaction. We are accustomed to insin-
cerity in play-writing, and do not expect each
character, fool or wise, young or old, to represent
its author. We allow, as, for an obvious ex-
ample, in Restoration comedy, plays to be
written from a standpoint that their authors
could not possibly maintain in private life. In
poetry also, we do not consider Browning insin-
cere because he speaks now for Lippo Lippi,
and now for Andrea del Sarto. In novels we
allow Fielding to write " Jonathan Wild " as
a satirist, and " Joseph Andrews " as a comic
romancer, and we are not shocked when he
relishes in imagination deeds that as a magistrate

163

OSCAR WILDE

he would be bound to censure. I think we have
to learn that all fine literature is dramatic. No
man pours from his mouth in any single speech
all the roses and the vomit that would represent
his soul. Men speak and hold their peace.
They make and their hands are still. And many
moods flit by while they are silent, and myriad
souls agitate the blood in the veins of those
motionless hands. The artist is he who, re-
membering this mood or that, can hold it fast
and maintain it long enough for the making
of a work of art. We do not ask him to retain
it further. The shaping of his mood in words
or in clay has already changed his personality.
The writer of a mad song need not gibber in
the streets. Golden phrases lose none of their
magnificence if he who made them wears plain
homespun when we meet him in the market-
place. He has been a king for a moment, and
given us his kingship for ever. We can ask no
more.

Wilde, perhaps more than other men, insisted
on the dramatic character of his work. In con-
sidering any of it we should remember those
sentences in the last paragraph of 'The Truth
of Masks': — "Not that I agree with every-
thing that I have said in this essay. There is
much with which I entirely disagree. The
essay simply represents an artistic standpoint,

164

DE PROFUNDIS

and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything."
I am not sure that this confession does not spoil
6 The Truth of Masks.' It is perilously like
an aside ; but Wilde was sufficiently subtle to
have chosen a mood which such an aside would
illustrate rather than contradict. In considering
his work, we must remember, first, that all work
is dramatic, true to an individual mood only ;
and, secondly, that Wilde, more clearly con-
scious of this than most artists, was better able
to take advantage of it. He was freed from
those qualms of conscience which made Swin-
burne glad to differentiate his earlier from his
later work by saying: — "In my next work
it should be superfluous to say that there is no
touch of dramatic impersonation or imaginary
emotion." This sentence, that denies together
what is universal and what does not exist (since
you cannot imagine an emotion without feeling
it) points to no blemish in Swinburne's work,
but only to a discomfort of mind that some of
it must have caused him. From this dis-
comfort Wilde was free. He had many
tuning - forks, and distrusted none of them
because it happened to be pitched differently
from another.

There is no doubt that, when De Profundis
was finished, Wilde regarded it as a document
of historical value, as a veracious confession.

165

OSCAR WILDE

This is clear from the tone in which he wrote
of it to Mr. Ross : — " I don't defend my con-
duct. I explain it. Also there are in my letter
certain passages which deal with my mental
development in prison, and the inevitable evolu-
tion of my character and intellectual attitude
towards life that has taken place ; and I want
you and others who still stand by me and have
affection for me to know exactly in what mood
and manner I hope to face the world." Those
sentences certainly let us see the attitude that
Wilde hoped to induce in his readers, but, if we
would turn to Wilde himself, and, careless of
the beauty of the work, pry past it to discover
the private feelings of the author, we must take
them not as a statement of the truth, but,
seeking the truth, take that statement into
account. That statement, the published De Pro-
fundis, those unpublished portions of the letter
which, probably, will never be read in our life-
time, the whole of Wilde's works, the whole
of his life, the character of that person to whom
he was immediately writing, the character of
those other friends by whom he desired to be
read, the character which, without deliberate
choice, he had himself grown accustomed to
present to them : we must know all these things,
and be able to weigh them exactly, and balance
them justly against each other. Have I not

166

DE PROFUNDIS

said enough to show that it is a vain task to
seek for the absolute truth in such a matter,
and that we are better and more hopefully
employed when we concern ourselves simply
with a wonderful piece of literature dictated by
certain conditions that we admit are impossible
accurately to discover ?

In pointing out that the details of Wilde's
life in prison did not affect the manner of his
thought, but only provided him with fresh
material, I do not wish to suggest that prison
was unimportant to him. It might have been.
He might, in revolt against it, have made it
no more than a hideous accident, stunting his
nature by not refusing to allow it to assimilate
the black bread that had been thrown to it as
well as the sweetened cakes. If he had been
earlier released, as he said, this might have
happened. He was not released, and revolt
was changed to acceptance, and, at last, he was
able to say, as he had hoped, that society's send-
ing him to prison ranked with his father's send-
ing him to Oxford, as a turning point in his life.
But that is a question for the next chapter, for
imprisonment did not radically alter him until
he was again in the world.

In prison, however, the anaesthetic of mag-
nificent living was denied him, and he turned to
magnificent thought, recovering the power that

167

OSCAR WILDE

had been his before popular success had nar-
rowed his horizon.

" Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it
Into impossible things, unlikely ends ;
And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire
Grow large as all the regions of thy soul." 1

In 1894 he had known the possible, and
achieved it in The Importance of Being
Earnest. But in 1889 he had been trying far
beyond it, and now again, in prison, he found
his desires growing far beyond the possible, and
covering the regions of his soul. He needed an
idea that should make this bread-and-water
existence one with that of wine and lilies, an
idea that should make it possible for him to
conceive his life as a whole, and, in the con-
ception, make it so.

In De Profundis he tries to make his friend
realize what he has scarcely realized himself;
the depth of his fall, the twilight in his cell, the
twilight in his heart, the nature of suffering, the
nature of the sorrow that does not allow itself
to be forgotten. He writes passages so poig-
nant as to blind us to their beauty, for sorrow
is no less sorrow when it walks in purple than
when in rags it lies in the dust. Then, after
showing the ruins of his life, he paints a picture,
no less poignant, of himself rebuilding that

1 From The Sale of St. Thomas. By Lascelles Abercrombie.

168

DE PROFUNDIS

broken edifice with those things that he has
hitherto rejected. He has learnt, he tells him-
self, the value of pain and the virtue of humility.
He has once believed that pain was a blemish
on creation, and that the sobbing of a child
made the gods hide their faces for shame. He
now believes that suffering is a means for the
purification of the spirit, a fire through which
vessels of clay must pass to their perfection.
And, for humility, he discovers that there is no
defiance so lofty as that of self-accusation. He
has been told to forget who he is ; life in prison
almost compels him to rebellion ; but he has
learnt that only by remembering his identity,
by shifting to his own shoulders the burden of
his disaster, and by an absolute acceptance of
all that has happened in and to him, will he be
able to win the pride that humility confers and
that rebellion makes impossible.

This purpose, to give his life the unity he
demanded from a poem; these motives, of
suffering and humility, run waveringly through
De Profundis, carrying with them here and
there fragments of mournful experience.
Through them he came to contemplate Christ,
not only as a type of humility and suffering,
but also as an example of one whose life was a
work of art. In such books as De Profundis,
the continuous wandering speech of a mind fol-

169

OSCAR WILDE

lowing itself, some paragraphs seem to with-
draw themselves a little, as the keynotes of the
rest. Such paragraphs are, I think, those in
which he wrote of Christ as the supreme artist,
of Christ's influence on art, and of his philosophy
as Wilde interpreted it. These paragraphs have
seemed blasphemous to some and unreasonable
to others. I cannot consider them more blas-
phemous than a Madonna and Child by Murillo,
or a Christ and his Father by Milton, or more
unreasonable than those persons who are unable
to perceive that religion, no less than the Sab-
bath, was made for man, and not for the delecta-
tion of the Almighty.

Man makes God in his own image, or as he
would like himself to be, and, as man's image
changes, so is his God continually recast.
Wilde's prose-poem of the artist and the
bronze is the story of the making and re-
making of religion. The Christ of the Roman
slaves who escaped from their masters' rods to
worship their God in cellars was indeed a Man
of Sorrows, who found in misery and low estate
the means of creating loveliness. As they
hoped, he promised, and each labourer's penny
was minted with the superscription he had
himself designed. With the renaissance of joy
came new Christs. One taught the Irish monks
to build their wattled cells. Another, delight-

170

DE PROFUNDIS

ing in richness no less than in simplicity, de-
signed the stone lacework of the French
cathedrals. Later, the sombre, fiery Calvin
saw a divinity of black and scarlet. Milton's
God conceived humanity as an epic, whose con-
clusion must neither be hurried nor delayed.
There have been Gods of war and Gods of
peace, changing with man's desires. It is for
that reason that we are warned to make no
graven images, lest we should commit our-
selves to a God of a single mood. It was quite
natural that the Christ whom Wilde saw, as he
sat on the wooden bench in his cell and turned
the pages of his Greek Testament, should be a
Christ who showed that in all the acts of his
life there had been hope, a Christ who perceived
" the enormous importance of living completely
for the moment," swept aside the tyranny of
orthodoxy, and "regarded sin and suffering as
being in themselves beautiful holy things and
modes of perfection."

Wilde expresses his conception with incom-
parable wit and charm. When he speaks of
Christ's love of the sinner, he remarks that
" the conversion of a publican into a Pharisee
would not have seemed to him a great achieve-
ment." On Christ's view that " one should not
bother too much over affairs," he comments,
"the birds didn't, why should man?" And

171

OSCAR WILDE

again : "The beggar goes to heaven because he
has been unhappy. I cannot conceive a better
reason for his being sent there. The people who
work for an hour in the vineyard in the cool of
the evening receive just as much reward as those
who have toiled there all day long in the hot
sun. Why shouldn't they? Probably no one
deserved anything." And I cannot refrain from
reminding myself by writing it down, of his
beautiful comparison of the Greek Testament
with the version that endless repetition without
choice of occasion has made an empty noise in
our ears : " When one returns to the Greek, it
is like going into a garden of lilies out of some
narrow and dark house." It pleased him to
accept the not generally received view of some
scholars, that Greek was the language actually
spoken by Christ, and that TereAeo-rat1 was in-
deed his last word and not a mere translation
of a similar expression in a Nazarene dialect of
Aramaic.

But Wilde's study of the gospels had left him
more than a handful of phrases, and these chance
flowers must not blind us to the garden of
thought in which they grew. Among the
subjects on which he planned to write was
" Christ as the precursor of the romantic move-

i KATA IOANNHN, XIX, 30.

172

DE PROFUNDIS

ment in life." This essay was never written,
but Wilde had made it almost unnecessary by
those suggestive paragraphs in the letter to his
friend.

Christ, for him, was a supreme artist, who
chose to build a beautiful thing in life instead
of in marble or song. Marble and song are to
the artist means of living, indeed the medium
of the highest life of which he is capable.
Christ essayed the more difficult task of giving
life itself the unity and the loveliness that another
might have given stone or melody. And this
beautiful and complete life, more moving in its
completeness than that of any of the gods of
Greece, who " in spite of the white and red of
their fair fleet limbs were not really what they
appeared to be," was at once a work of art and
the life of an artist. Christ, Wilde saw, cared
more for intensity than for magnificence, for
the soul more than raiment. His teaching was
not one of the refusal of experience, but of
self-development. He set personality above
possessions, and told his followers to forgive
their enemies, for their own sake, not because
their enemies wished to be forgiven ; it is very
annoying to be forgiven. "But," says Wilde,
"while Christ did not say to men 'Live for
others,' he pointed out that there was no
difference at all between the lives of others

173

OSCAR WILDE

and one's own life." And it is this truth that
marks the difference between ancient and
modern art. In reading ancient critics of
ancient art, we perceive that their view of
the tragedies whose performance they were
privileged to see in the open amphitheatres of
Greece was narrower than ours. Theirs was
the spectacle of a good man or a good woman
at odds with tragic circumstance. We have
made tragic circumstance human, and, though
we walk with Christ to Calvary, we also wash
trembling hands with Pontius Pilate.

It is just this widened sympathy, this vitaliza-
tion of other things in a story besides the hero
that divides what is called romantic from what
is called classical art. To Greek tragedy there
was a background of the Fates ; but nobody
sympathized with them. In whatever is classi-
cal as opposed to romantic in modern art, we
shall find a background of Fates with whom
nobody sympathizes, in whom nobody believes.
But all the world was alive to St. Francis.
Shakespeare is myriad-mouthed as well as my-
riad-minded. Daffodils are alive for him no less
than kings, and lago is a man no less than
Othello. And in all art that springs from the
spirit, thought Wilde, "wherever there is a
romantic movement in art, there somehow, and
under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ."

174

DE PROFUNDIS

Wilde, thinking in prison of Christianity in art,
saw through the stone walls the cathedral at
Chartres in the blue morning mist, Dante and
Virgil walking in hell, the painted ship of the
ancient mariner idly rocking upon the painted
ocean, Juliet leaning from her balcony, Pierre
Vidal flying as a wolf before the hounds, the
irises of Baudelaire, the bird-song of Verlaine,
the breaking heart of Russian storytelling,
Tannhauser in the Venusberg, and all the
flowers and children who have laughed in a wind
of song.

For the mind, as for love,

" Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."

Wilde had all the art of the world before
him as he wrote. Seldom in his life did his
thought move more magnificently and with
greater wealth of illustration than in the cell
where, in a perpetual twilight, his mind alone
could illumine itself, and in its own light pursue
that game of thinking whose essential it is to
be free and harmonious.1 Its harmonies are
those of agreement with its own character, like
the harmonies of art. Its freedom is that of
the consistent representation of the character
chosen by the thinker. In De Profundis Wilde

1 " L'exercice de la pens£e est un jeu, mais il faut que ce jeii soit
libre et harmonieux. " — REMY DE GOURMONT.

175

OSCAR WILDE

wrote as harmoniously and freely as if his life
were spent in conversation instead of in silence,
in looking at books and pictures instead of in
shredding oakum or in swinging the handle of
a crank.

It is impossible too firmly to emphasize
the division between the texture of the life in
De Profundis and that of Wilde's life in prison,
a division not only needing explanation but
explicable in the light of later events. When
he left prison he wrote The Ballad of Reading
Gaol. Now that ballad would have been ob-
scured or enriched by a silver cobweb of scarcely
perceptible sensations if it had been written
before or during his imprisonment. Wilde could
not then have suffered some of the harsh and
crude effects that are harmonious with its
character and necessary to its success. The
newly-learnt insensibility, that allowed him to
use in the ballad emotions that once he would
have carefully guarded himself from perceiving,
had been taught him in prison. In prison his
nerves had been so jangled that they responded
only to a violent agitation, so jarred that a deli-
cate touch left them silent. But at the time
of the writing of De Profundis these janglings
and jarrings were too immediate to affect him.
They disappeared like print held too close to the
eye. He escaped from them as he wrote, for

176

DE PROFUNDIS

he wrote from memory. While the events were
happening, had just happened, and might happen
again, that produced the insensibility without
which he could not have secured the broad and
violent effects of his later work, he returned,
in writing, to an earlier life. When he took up
his pen, it was as if none of these things were,
unless as material for the use of an aloof and
conscious artist. He was outside the prison as
he wrote, and only saw as if in vision the tall
man, with roughened hands, who had once been
" King of life," and now was writing in a cell.

M 177

X

1897-1900

" ALL trials," wrote Wilde, " are trials for one's
life, just as all sentences are sentences of death ;
and three times have 1 been tried. The first
time I left the box to be arrested, the second
time to be led back to the house of detention,
the third time to pass into a prison for two
years. Society, as we have constituted it, will
have no place for me, has none to offer; but
Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and
just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I
may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I
may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night
with stars so that I may walk abroad in the
darkness without stumbling, and send the wind
over my footprints so that none may track me
to my hurt : she will cleanse me in great waters,
and with bitter herbs make me whole."

He asked too much, both from Nature and
from himself. Society would indeed have none
of him, as he had foreseen, but Nature could
only harbour for a moment this liver in great
cities who had told her that her use was to
illustrate quotations from the poets, and had

178

1897-1900

said that he preferred to have her captive on
his walls in the canvases of Corot and of Con-
stable, than to live in her cruder landscapes.
He had never intended to make too elaborate
an advance to her. He had learnt from Steven-
son's letters that that ingenious man had "merely
extended the sphere of the artificial by taking to
digging." He knew that reading Baudelaire in
a cafe would be more natural to him than an
agricultural existence. He was determined, how-
ever, not to return to the extravagances of his
life before prison, and he hoped that the country
would help him to keep this resolve. He was
to learn that " one merely wanders round and
round within the circle of one's personality."
When he left prison he did not know that one
must keep moving, but hoped to choose a
pleasant point in his personality, and stay there.

Released from prison on May 19, 1897, he
crossed the Channel to Dieppe, where he stayed
for some days, and drove about with Mr. Robert
Ross and Mr. Reginald Turner, examining the
surrounding villages, most of which seemed
uninhabitable. At the end of a week he took
rooms in the inn at the little hamlet of Berneval.

Here, for the first time, he lost his power
of turning life into tapestry. Alone in his
cell he had written the magnificent pageant of
De Profundis, a pageant of purple and fine

179

OSCAR WILDE

linen, though he who wrote it wore the coarse
cloth of convict dress. Set suddenly in the
world again, he was cut off more sharply from
his former existence than ever he had been cut
off in prison. He became blithe and smiling,
like a child who has had no past. He bathed,
and was amused at the simplicity of his ex-
perience, which he laughingly attributed to
having attended Mass and so not bathing as
a pagan. ..." I was not tempted by either
Sirens or Mermaidens, or any of the green-haired
following of Glaucus. I really think this is a
remarkable thing. In my Neronian days the
sea was always full of Tritons blowing conches,
and other unpleasant things. Now it is quite
different." " Prison has completely changed
me," he said to M. Andre Gide, who visited him
at Berneval ; " I counted on it for that." He
spoke with disparagement of a man who urged
him to take up his former life, a thing, he said,
which one must never do. " Ma vie est comme
un ceuvre d'art ; un artiste ne recommence
jamais deux fois la meme chose . . . ou bien
c'est qu'il n'avait pas reussi. Ma vie d'avant la
prison a ete aussi reussie que possible. Mainte-
nant c'est une chose achevee." He felt that a
continuation of a life that had, as it were, ended
in prison, would be like adding a sixth act
and a happy ending to a tragedy, a deed re-

180

1897-1900

pulsive to an artist, who finds it hard enough to
bear when murdered Caesar doffs his wig and
smiles upon the audience that has witnessed
the agony of his death. He did not wish to
appear in Paris until he had had time to lay
aside the costume he had worn in the play that,
he was glad to think, was now concluded. He
did not wish to be received as a released convict,
but as the author of a new work of art. " If
I can produce only one beautiful work of art
I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and
cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the
tongue of scorn by the roots." For the moment,
at any rate, he was content in the country, and
asked M. Gide to send him a Life of St. Francis.
" If I live in Paris," he wrote, " I may be
doomed to things I don't desire. I am afraid of
big towns. Here I get up at 7.30 ... I am
happy all day. I go to bed at 10 o'clock. I am
frightened of Paris ... I want to live here." He
visited the little chapel of Notre Dame de Liesse,
and persuaded the cure to celebrate Mass there.
He made friends with a farmer and urged him to
adopt three children. He found that the customs-
officers were bored, and lent them the novels
of Dumas pere. And on the day of the Queen's
Diamond Jubilee he entertained forty children
from the school with their master so success-
fully that for days after they cheered when he

181

OSCAR WILDE

passed : " Vive Monsieur Melmoth l et la Heine
d'Angleterre." In his first enthusiasm for Berne-
val he wished to build a house there, and did,
indeed, take a chalet for the season, giving
Mr. Ross, through whom his allowance passed,
all sorts of amusing reasons for doing so, and
for hurrying on the necessary preliminaries.
He planned the arrangement of the house with
something of the impatient delight of a student
furnishing his first independent rooms. He
asked for his pictures, and for Japanese gold
paper that should provide a fitting background
for lithographs by Rothenstein and Shannon.
The Chalet Bourgeat was ready for habitation
on June 21. A month later he wrote of The
Ballad of Reading Gaol : " The poem is nearly
finished. Some of the verses are awfully good."
He had left prison with an improved physique,
and, now that he was able to work, there was
hope that he would not risk the loss of it by
leaving this life of comparative simplicity. Sud-
denly, however, he flung aside his plans and
resolutions, desperately explaining that his folly
was inevitable. The iterated entreaty of a man
whose friendship had already cost him more than
it was worth, and a newly-felt loneliness at
Berneval, destroyed his resolution. He became
restless and went to Rouen, where it rained and

1 After he left prison he took the name of Sebastian Melmoth.
182

1897-1900

he was miserable ; then back to Dieppe ; a few
days later, with his poem still unfinished, he was
in Naples sharing a momentary magnificence
with the friend whose conduct he had con-
demned, whose influence he had feared.

I have particularly noticed the change in his
mental attitude that became apparent at Berne -
val, because I think that it throws light on the
character of the work he did after leaving prison,
so markedly different from that of De Profundis,
or Intentions, or The Sphinx ', or any other of the
delightful designs it had pleased him to em-
broider. What is remarkable in The Ballad
of Reading Gaol, apart from its strength, or its
violence of emotion, is a change in the quality
of Wilde's language. A distinction between
decoration and realism, though it immediately
suggests itself, is too blunt to enable us to state
clearly a change in Wilde's writing that it is
impossible to overlook. We require a more
sensitive instrument, and must seek it in a
definition of literature, a formula that is
concerned with the actual medium that litera-
ture employs.

To make such a definition I have borrowed
two words from the terminology of physical
science. Energy is described by physicists as

183

OSCAR WILDE

kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force
actually exerted. Potential energy is force
that a body is in a position to exert. Applying
these terms to language, without attempting too
strict an analogy, I wish to define the medium
of literature as a combination of kinetic with
potential speech. There is no such thing in
literature as speech purely kinetic or purely
potential. Purely kinetic speech is prose, not
good prose, not literature, but colourless prose,
prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that
M. Jourdain discovered he had been speaking all
his life. It says things. An example of purely
potential speech may be found in music. I do
not think it can be made with words, though we
can give our minds a taste of it in listening to a
meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a poem
in a language that we do not understand. The
proportion between kinetic and potential speech
and the energy of the combination vary with dif-
ferent poems and with the poetry of different ages.
Let me take an example of fine poetry, and
show that it does perform in itself this dual
function of language. Let us examine the first
stanza of Blake's " The Tiger " :-

" Tiger ! Tiger ! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry ? "
184

1897-1900

It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion
wielded by those four lines, a power utterly dis-
proportionate to what is actually said. The
kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition
to a supposed tiger of a difficult problem in
metaphysics. But above, below, and on either
side of that question, completely enveloping it,
is the phosphorescence of another speech, that
we cannot so easily overhear.1

Let me now apply this formula of kinetic and
potential speech to a definition of the change
in Wilde's aims as a writer, that is illustrated by
The Ballad of Reading Gaol. 1 have said that
the proportion between kinetic and potential
speech varies with different poems and the
poetry of different ages. The poets of the
eighteenth century, for example, cared greatly
for kinetic speech, though the white fire of their
better work shows that they were fortunately
prevented from its invariable achievement. The
Symbolists of the nineteenth century cared
greatly for potential speech. " Nommer un
objet," said Mallarme, " c'est supprimer les trois
quarts de la jouissance du poeme qui est faite du
bonheur de deviner peu a peu. Le suggerer,
voila le reve." Mallarme, indeed, went so far

1 For a longer but still inadequate discussion of the question,
see an article in C( The Oxford and Cambridge Review " for October,
1911.

185

OSCAR WILDE

as to work over a poem, destroying where he
could its kinetic speech, its direct statement, in
the effort to make it purely potential. He is
not intelligible, except where he failed in this.
Wilde grew up with the Symbolists, and under
the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. His criti-
cism of pictures accurately reflects his aims as
a writer. The critic, he says, will turn from
pictures that are too intelligible that "do not
stir the imagination but set definite bounds to
it " ; "he will turn from them to such works as
make him brood and dream and fancy, to works
that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and
seem to tell us that even from them there is an
escape into a wider world." He will have none
of " those obvious modes of art that have but
one message to deliver, and having delivered it
become dumb and sterile." He recognized sug-
gestion or, as I prefer to say, potentiality, in
pictures that were decorations rather than anec-
dotes, and, in his preference of potential over
kinetic speech, made his own work decorative
rather than realistic. Decoration was for him a
mode of potentiality. Like the Symbolists, he
had a sort of contempt for kinetic speech, be-
cause while it obviously preponderates in the
kind of writing that he considered bad, he did
not perceive that it is also essential in the writing
that he admitted to be good. This view was

186

1897-1900

intimately connected with his character, and
before he could write a poem whose kinetic was
comparable to its potential power he had to
change completely his attitude towards life.
He could not, without doing violence to himself,
have written The Ballad of Reading Gaol before
his imprisonment.

Such an alteration in his attitude became
apparent when he was released : not before.
And he then proceeded to write a poem whose
potentiality was not won at the expense of
directness. The difference between the work
he did before and after his release is the same,
though not so exaggerated, as that between Mal-
larme' and the eighteenth-century poets. The
later work falls midway between these two
extremes. It is writing that depends, far more
nearly than anything he had yet done, in verse,
upon its actual statements. The Ballad of
Reading Gaol is not more powerfully sugges-
tive than The Sphinx, but what it says, its
translatable element, is more important to its
effect than the catalogue of the Sphinx's lovers.

We can more accurately observe this change
of attitude if we examine the early version of
the ballad. This version, as it is now printed
by the side of that originally published, repre-
sents the poem as it was when Wilde wrote
to say that it was nearly finished. It is pro-

187

OSCAR WILDE

bably very like what the poem would have been
if he had not broken short his stay at Berneval.
The momentary retaste of his former life at
Naples gave him the more decorative verses
that were then added, and the contrast between
the two moods made possible his disregard of
the beliefs he once had held concerning the evil
effect of a message on a work of art. At the
same time, he realized at Naples how far he had
departed from his old standards, and added
a certain recklessness to his already altered
equipment. For example, he had written at
Berneval one stanza of direct statement that
he had afterwards deleted with others from the
first version that he sent to England : —

ft The Governor was strong upon

The Regulation Act :
The Doctor said that Death was but

A scientific fact :
And twice a day the chaplain called

And left a little tract."

At Naples he replaced it. He admits, in
a letter to Mr. Ross, that "the poetry is not
good," and says, "I have put 'The Governor
was strict upon the Regulation Act' — I now
think that strong is better. The verse is meant
to be colloquial — G. R. Sims at best — and when
one is going for a coarse effect, one had better
be coarse. So please restore ' strong.' " I think

188

1897-1900

that nothing could more clearly illustrate the
difference between Wilde as artist before and
after he was released. The change was radical,
and appeared not only in the medium of his
work but in its intention. He had once said
that nothing was sadder in the history of litera-
ture than the career of Charles Reade, who,
after writing "The Cloister and the Hearth,"
" wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt
to be modern, to draw public attention to the
state of our convict prisons." Now, he cheer-
fully labelled his ballad, " Poetry and Propa-
ganda," and admitted that though the poem
should end with the fifth canto, he had some-
thing to say and must therefore go on a little
longer. He had once written for his own
admiration, and, to his disadvantage, for that
of people he might meet at dinner. He now
wished to publish his ballad in one of the more
widely read newspapers, to reach the sort of
people who had shared his life in gaol. He had
become anxious to speak and to be heard, and
was no longer content to make and to be
admired.

Little trace of the friction of change is left in
the poem. It is true that in certain lights a
reader may perceive that he is examining a
palimpsest, and wonder what manner of writer
he was whose writing is obliterated. But there

189

OSCAR WILDE

is an energy in the ballad that swings even the
more obvious propaganda into the powerful
motion of the poetry. Nowhere else in Wilde's
work is there such a feeling of tense muscles, of
difficult, because passionate, articulation. And
this was the effect that he was willing to achieve.
The blemishes on the poem, its moments of bad
verse, its metaphors only half conceived (like
the filling of an urn that has long been broken)
scarcely mar the impression. It is felt that a
relaxed watchfulness is due to the effort of
reticence. I know of no other poem that so
intensifies our horror of mortality. Beside it
Wordsworth's sonnets on Capital Punishment
debate with aloof, respectable philosophy the
expediency of taking blood for blood, and
suggest the palliatives with which a tender heart
may soothe the pain of its acquiescence. Even
Villon, who, like Wilde, had been in prison,
and, unlike Wilde, had been himself under
sentence of death, is infinitely less actual. He
sees only after death : the gibbet, the row of
corpses, their heads hanging, the eyes picked
from their sockets by the crows, a row of
blackened, sun-dried bodies swinging in wind
and rain. He sees that, and thinks it a pitiful
spectacle, but his only prayer is "qu'enfer n'ayt
de nous la maistrie ! " For Wilde it is life that
matters. After it, who knows ? A pall of

190

1897-1900

burning lime, a barren spot where might be
roses. But he lives an hundred times life's last
moments, and multiplies the agony of the man
who dies in the hearts of all those others who
feel with him how frail is their own perilous
hold.

Wilde's two letters to The Daily Chronicle,
'On the Case of Warder Martin,' and ' On
Prison Reform,' show just such a change in his
attitude towards social questions as that which
the ballad shows in his attitude towards poetry.
I have not, so far, said anything of The Soul of
Man under Socialism, and I left undiscussed the
consciousness of social problems that is apparent
in some of the fairy tales. It seemed better to
consider these things later in the book, when it
should be possible to compare his attitudes
towards the social system before and after he
had come in conflict with it.

At the beginning of his career he had written
republican poetry, but had prefaced it with the
avowal : —

" Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,—
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea

And give my rage a brother ! "

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OSCAR WILDE

But for this, he says, nations might be wronged
and he remain unmoved,

"... and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things."

For several years this double attitude persisted,
though, as Wilde left boyhood he left also the
rage and the passions, if he had ever had them,
that could only be mirrored by turbulent oceans
and fiery revolutions. He was, however, in-
creasingly troubled by the knowledge that he
could not accept the comfortable belief of Dr.
Pangloss, that this is the best of all possible
worlds. If he had lived among the poor, he
would, perhaps, have amused them by pointing
out the undeserved misery of the rich. As he
happened, mostly, to live among the rich, he
stimulated their enjoyment of their position by
reminding them of the insecurity of their tenure,
of the existence of the poor, and of the inade-
quacy of the means adopted to eliminate them.
At that time in England many charitable move-
ments, now institutions, had only lately started
upon their curious careers, and, as Wilde pointed
out, men " tried to solve the problem of poverty,
for instance, by keeping the poor alive ; or, in
the case of a very advanced school, by amusing
the poor." Wilde suggested no remedies, but

192

1897-1900

used his own clear perception of the difficulty,
and the uneasiness of other people's minds, as a
background for much delightful conversation, and
for such stories as that of ' The Young King,'
who sees in dreams the pain that is hidden in the
pearl that the diver has brought for his sceptre,
the toil woven into the golden tissues of his
robes, and the blood that fills with light the
rubies of his crown.

Yet Wilde was not without a personal stake
in the solution of the problem, for, though he
lived among the rich, he was himself one of the
poor. He had not had enough money to write
as he pleased and when he pleased. He had had
to lecture, to write in newspapers, and to edit a
magazine for women. Perhaps the solution of
the problem of poverty would also solve that of
unpopular art and of the cakes and wine of the
unpopular artist. I cannot easily understand
the extraordinary position that, I am told, The
Soul of Man has taken in the literature of
revolution. It does, it is true, say many just
things of the poor, as for example, its rebuke
of thrift : " Man should not be ready to show
that he can live like a badly fed animal." It
upholds agitators. It praises the ingratitude of
those to whom is given only a little of what is
their own. But the essay as a whole is scarcely
at all concerned with popular revolt. It is con-
N 193

OSCAR WILDE

cerned less with socialism than with individual-
ism. " The chief advantage that would result
from the establishment of Socialism, is, un-
doubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve
us from that sordid necessity of living for others
which in the present condition of things, presses
so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact,
scarcely anyone at all escapes." Wilde had not
escaped himself. " Under Socialism," he says,
" all this will, of course, be altered." There is
no need to estimate the precise quality of the
irony in that "of course." If Socialism meant
the ruling of the people by the people, Wilde
disliked it, as a new form of an old tyranny.
He took it simply as an hypothesis of free food
for everybody and the abolition of property.
Rich and poor alike, he supposed, were to sell
all they had and give ... to the state. He
was interested solely in the development of
personality, which, he thought, was hindered
by the existence of private property, whether
possessed or not possessed, a plus or a minus
quantity. " Socialism itself," he says, " will be of
value simply because it will lead to Individual-
ism," an individualism now difficult and rare,
because it consists in the free development of
personality that property, plus or minus, makes
almost impossible except in special cases. That
seems to me to be a very different Socialism

194

1897-1900

from that of the people who, accepting greedily
the sops thrown to Cerberus in the course of
the essay, are willing to accept the whole as
a manifesto of social revolution. Wilde keeps
aloof from rich and poor alike, and, throughout
a long paper, more carelessly written than most
of his, is simply speculating upon what art can
gain by social reform, and of what kind that
reform must be, if art is not to be left in a
worse case than before it. The essay is like
notes from half a dozen charming, and, at that
time, daring talks, thrown together, and loosely
brought into some sort of unity by a frail con-
necting thread.

In its airy distance from practical politics,
nothing could be more dissimilar than The Soul
of Man from the two letters to The Daily
Chronicle. While he lived in it, Wilde had
been able to disguise, at least sometimes, his
lack of independence from society. When
society put him in prison he was face to face
with that unpleasing fact. From being the
subject of ironical discussion, society and its
reform became most powerful and insistent reali-
ties. The poor were no longer people whose
unlovely woe he did not like to remember, but
men whom he had met, men from whom he had
received kindness when he, like them, was "in
trouble." Reform was no longer a vague idea

195

OSCAR WILDE

with possibilities at once dangerous and delight-
ful, but concrete, and with an immediate end.
It was concerned not with the development of
individuality, but with saving from disaster one
poor man who had disobeyed regulations in
giving a biscuit to a starving child, and many
poor men from sleeping unnecessarily in an at-
mosphere of decaying excreta. The Ballad of
Reading Gaol was poetry and propaganda ; the
two letters scarcely troubled about anything but
their urgent purpose, though Wilde was in-
capable of writing sentences that should not
be dignified and urbane. A beggar had been
allowed into the Palace of Art, and would not
be denied.

Soon after Wilde left Berneval for Naples,
those who controlled the allowance that enabled
him to live with his friend purposely stopped it.
His friend, as soon as there was no money, left
him. "It was," said Wilde, "a most bitter
experience in a bitter life." He went to Paris.
In February 1898, the ballad, that he had not
been able to sell to a newspaper, was published
as a book. In March The Daily Chronicle
printed the second of the letters on prison abuses.
He wrote nothing else after he left prison, but
revised The Importance of Being Earnest and
An Ideal Husband for publication, and super-

196

1897-1900

vised the French translation of the ballad made
by M. Davray, who, as he pointed out, had not
had the advantage of imprisonment, and was
consequently puzzled to find equivalents to
some of the words. He suggested the plot of
a play that another man wrote. There was talk
of his adapting a French play for the English
stage ; but nothing came of it. He complained
that he found it "not easy to recapture the
artistic mood of detachment from the activity
of life." He often left Paris. In December,
1898, he went to Napoule, and in the following
spring to Switzerland.

His work was done, and, after the writing of
the ballad, he was impotent of any sustained
effort, whether in life or in literature. He lost,
however, little of his intellectual activity, and
none of his power of enjoyment. When he was
in Rome in the spring of 1900, he learnt how to
use a photographic camera, and took innumer-
able photographs with a most childlike en-
thusiasm. He was blessed by the Pope, not
once only but seven times. His pleasure in
watching the ceremonies of the Church recalled
the year when, as an Oxford undergraduate, he
had half-hoped, half-feared to find salvation, or,
at least, a religious experience.

In May he returned to Paris, where his life
cannot but have been humiliating to one who

197

OSCAR WILDE

had been "le Roi de la vie." Many doors
were closed to him and others he was too proud
to enter. He spent days and nights in cafes,
drank too much, and wasted his conversation on
students who treated him without respect. He
had sufficient money, but his extravagances often
left him penniless. M. Stuart Merrill has a note
from him asking for a very little sum, " afin de
finir ma semaine." He was not starving, as has
been suggested, nor was he entirely deserted by
his friends, though most of the French writers
ignored in misfortune the man they had
worshipped in success. M. Paul Fort, almost
the only French poet of whom in his last illness
Wilde spoke with affection, spent much time
with him, and remembers him not outwardly un-
happy, less capable than he had been of conceal-
ing his depths, and interested in everything, like
a child. Another Frenchman who saw him dur-
ing these months thought him dazed, like a man
who has had a blow on the head. The two
opinions are not contradictory. They represent
a man whose power of will has been suddenly
taken from him. Wilde no longer picked and
chose ; he no longer, a critic in life as in art,
directed his doings with intention and self-know-
ledge. He could no longer dominate life and
twist her to the patterns he desired, but was
become flotsam in a stream now obviously much

198

1897-1900

stronger than himself. He could smile as he
drifted, but he could not stop.

As the year went on, he fell ill, and though
he rallied more than once, and never lost the
brilliance and clarity of his intellect except in
delirium, he grew steadily worse. His death
was hurried by his inability to give up the
drinking to which he had become accustomed.
It was directly due to meningitis, the legacy of
an attack of tertiary syphilis. For some months
he had increasingly painful headaches. On
October 10, he was operated upon. He rallied
after the operation, and, a fortnight later,
was in a condition to talk with wit and charm,
as, for example, when he said that he was
dying beyond his means. On October 29, he
got up and went to a cafe. On the 30th, he
was less well, though he drove in the Bois.
Throughout November he grew steadily weaker,
and was often hysterical and delirious. Special-
ists were called in consultation but could do
little more than label the manner of his
death. On November 29, a priest, brought
by Mr. Robert Ross, baptized him into the
Catholic Church, and administered extreme
unction.

The following account of his last hours is
taken from a letter written by Mr. Ross to a
friend, ten days after Wilde's death. Mr.

199

OSCAR WILDE

Reginald Turner had nursed Wilde for some
time before his death and, with Mr. Ross and the
proprietor of the hotel,1 was present when he died.

" About five-thirty in the morning (November
30) a complete change came over him, the lines
of the face altered, and I believe what is called
the death-rattle began, but I had never heard
anything like it before, it sounded like the horri-
ble turning of a crank, and it never ceased until
the end. His eyes did not respond to the light
test any longer. Foam and blood came con-
tinually from his mouth. . . . From one o'clock
we did not leave the room, the painful noise
from the throat became louder and louder.
(We) destroyed letters to keep ourselves from
breaking down. The two nurses were out and
the proprietor of the hotel had come up to take
their place ; at 1.45 the time of his breathing
altered. I went to the bedside and held his
hand, his pulse began to flutter. He heaved
a deep sigh, the only natural one I had heard
since I arrived, the limbs seemed to stretch in-
voluntarily, the breathing became fainter, he
passed at ten minutes to two exactly."

On December 3, 1900, Oscar Wilde was buried
in the Cemetery of Bagneux. On July 20, 1909,
his remains were moved to Pere Lachaise.

1 Hotel d' Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux Arts.

200

XI
AFTERTHOUGHT

WILDE has been dead for nearly a dozen years.
Already the more swiftly fading colours of his
work are vanishing ; already critics who fix their
eyes on that departing brilliance are helping his
books into the neglect that often precedes and
invariably follows popularity. His life is already
midway between fact and legend, between
realism and glamour. His life and his books
alternately illumine and obscure each other.
The mutilated De Profundis is given a bio-
graphical importance that it does not, in its
present state, possess, and the scarlet and drab
contrasts of his tattered tapestry of existence
blind the eyes of people who would otherwise
read his books.

• • • • •

There is a word, often applied to Wilde in
his lifetime, that has, since his death, been used
to justify a careless neglect of his work. That
word is "pose." In all such popular characteri-
zations there is hidden a distorted morsel of
truth. Such a morsel of truth is hidden here.
We need not examine the dull envy of brilliance,

201

OSCAR WILDE

the envy felt by timid persons of a man who
dared to display the hopes and the intentions
that were making holiday within him, the envy
that used that word as a reproach, and sought
to veil the fact that it was a confession. But
we shall do well to discover what it was beside
that envy that made the word applicable to
Wilde.

Wilde " posed " as an aesthete. He was an
aesthete. He "posed" as brilliant. He was
brilliant. He " posed " as cultured. He was
cultured. The quality in him to which that
word was applied was not pretence, though that
was willingly suggested, but display. Wilde
let people see, as soon as he could, and in any
way that was possible, who and what he was or
wished to be. No bushel hid his lamp. He
arranged it where it could best be seen, and
beat drums before it to summon the spectators.
He had every quality of a charlatan, except one :
the inability to keep his promises. Wilde
promised nothing that he could not perform.
But, because he promised so loudly, he earned
the scorn of those whom charlatans do not
outwit. He has even met with the scorn of
charlatans, who cannot understand why he
made so much noise when he really could do
what he promised.

The noise and the display that were insepar-
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AFTERTHOUGHT

able from any stage of Wilde's career, and were
not without an indirect echo and repetition in
his books, were partly due to the self-conscious-
ness that was among his most valuable assets.
He knew himself, and he knew his worth, and,
conscious of an intellectual pre-eminence over
most of his fellows, assumed its recognition, and
was in a hurry to bring the facts level with his
assumption. He had, more than most men, a
dramatic conception of himself. " There is a
fatality," says the painter of Dorian Gray,
"about all physical and intellectual distinction,
the sort of fatality that seems to dog the falter-
ing steps of kings. It is better not to be
different from one's fellows." Wilde was always
profoundly conscious of his own " physical and
intellectual distinction," not with the almost
scornful consciousness of Poe, but with a depre-
cating pride and a sense of what was due to it
from himself and from others. Wilde's " pose "
— call it what you will — is easily adopted by
talent since Wilde created it with genius. Its
origin was a sense of the possession of genius, of
being distinct from the rest of the world. Poe
emphasized this distinction by looking at people
from a distance. Wilde emphasized it by
charming them, with a kind of desperate
generosity. He knew that he had largesse to
scatter, and not till the end of his life did he

203

OSCAR WILDE

begin to feel that he had wasted it, that in him
a vivid personality had passed through the world
and was not leaving behind it a worthy memo-
rial. This was not the common regret at having
been unable to accomplish things. It was a
regret at leaving insufficient proof of a power of
accomplishment that he did not doubt, but had
never exerted to the uttermost. In thinking of
the virtuosity of Wilde's manner, a thing not
at all common in English literature, we must
remember the consciousness of power that
wrapped his days in a bright light, served him
sometimes as a mantle of invisibility, and made
him loved and hated with equal vehemence.
His tasks were always too easy for him. He
never strained for achievement, and nothing
requires more generosity to forgive than success
without effort.

This consciousness of his power excused in
him an extravagance that in a lesser man would
have been laughable. He would have it recog-
nised at all costs, for confirmation's sake. He
needed admiration at once, from the world,
from England, from London, from any small
company in which he happened to be. The
same desires whose gratification earned him the
epithet " poseur," made him expend in conversa-
tion energies that would have multiplied many
times the volume if not the value of his writings.

204

AFTERTHOUGHT

He pawned much of himself to the moment,
and was never able to redeem it.

He leaves three things behind him, a legend,
his conversation, and his works. The legend
will be that of a beautiful boy, so gifted that all
things were possible to him, so brilliant that in
middle age men still thought him young,
stepping through imaginary fields of lilies and
poisonous irises, and finding the flowers turned
suddenly to dung, and his feet caught in a
quagmire not only poisonous but ugly. It will
include the less intimate horror of a further
punishment, an imprisonment without the
glamour of murder, as with Wainewright, or
that of burglary, as with Deacon Brodie, but a
hideous publication to the world of the sordid
transformation of those imagined flowers. The
lives of Villon and of a few saints can alone
show such swift passage from opulence to
wretchedness, from ease to danger, from the
world to a cell. We are not here concerned
to blame or palliate the deeds that made this
catastrophe possible, but only to remark that to
Wilde himself, in comparison with the life of
his intellect, they probably seemed infinitely un-
important and insignificant. The life of the
thinker is in thought, of the artist in art. He
feels it almost unfair that mere actions should
be forced into a position where they have power

205

OSCAR WILDE

over his destiny. As time goes on, the legend
will, no doubt, be modified. It is too dramatic
to be easily forgotten.

In earlier chapters I have spoken of the
conversational quality of Wilde's prose, but
not, so far, of his conversation, which, to some
of those who knew him best, seemed more
valuable than the echo of it in his books. It
varied at different periods and in different
companies. More than one writer has described
it, and the descriptions do not agree. With
an audience that he thought stupid he was
startling, said extravagant things and asked
impossible questions. With another, he would
trace an idea through history, filling out the
facts he needed for his argument with bright
pageants of colour, like the paragraphs of In-
tentions. At one dinner-table he discoursed ;
at another he told stories. Wilde "ne causait
pas ; il contait," says M. Gide. He spoke in
parables, and, as he was an artist, he made
more of the parables than of their meanings.
An idea of this fairy-tale talk may be gathered
from his Poems in Prose. These things, among
the most wonderful that Wilde wrote, are
said to be less beautiful in their elaborate
form than as he told them over the dinner-
table, suggested by the talk that passed. They
are certainly a little heavy with gold and

206

AFTERTHOUGHT

precious stones. They are wistful, like prin-
cesses in fairy-tales who look out on the world
from under their crowns, when other children
toss their hair in the wind. But we may well
fail to imagine the conversation in which such
anecdotes could have a part, not as excrescences
but one in texture with the rest. No other
English talker has talked in this style, and the
Queen Scheherazada did not surpass it when
she talked to save her life. Beside Lamb's
stuttered jests, Hazlitt's incisions, Coleridge's
billowy eloquence, Wilde's tapestried speech
must be set among the regrettable things of
which time has carelessly deprived us. 1 have
heard it said that Wilde talked for effect. The
peacock spreads his tail in burning blue and
gold against the emerald lawn, and as Whistler
made a room of it, so Wilde made conversation.
He talked less to say than to make, and his
manner is suggested by his own description
of the talk of Lord Henry Wotton in The
Picture of Dorian Gray: —

" He played with the idea, and grew wilful ;
tossed it into the air and transformed it ; let it
escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent
with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The
praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a
philosophy, and Philosophy herself became
young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure,

207

OSCAR WILDE

wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe
and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over
the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus
for being sober. Facts fled before her like
frightened forest things. Her white feet trod
the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the
seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs
in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red
foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping
sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation."

Wilde improvised like that. A metaphor
would suddenly grow more important in his
eyes than the idea that had called lit into
being. The idea would vanish in the picture;
the picture would elaborate itself and become
story, and then, dissolving like a pattern in a
kaleidoscope, turn to idea again, and allow him
to continue on his way. Wilde talked tapestries,
as he wrote them. He saw his conversation,
and made other men see it. They thought him
a magician.

And now that mouth is closed, from which, as
from Alain Chartier's, " so many golden words
have proceeded." Death has given the kiss of
the Lady Anne of Brittany, and the glittering
words are blown away, or fallen in the pages of
other men's books to gild a meagre ground. In
fifty years' time the last of those who heard him
speak will be old men and dull of memory, or

208

AFTERTHOUGHT

garrulous with tedious invention. The talk is
gone. Wilde had no Boswell. All that largesse
of genius has been carried away and spent, or
thrown away and forgotten. A talker is like an
actor. It is only possible to say, he was wonder-
ful on such an evening, or on such another, and, as
time goes on and this becomes matter of hearsay,
why, it is as if his achievement had never been.
For the flowers of his talk bloom only in dead
men's memories, and have been buried with
their skulls.

Wilde's talk is gone, but its effects remain in
the conversational ease of his prose, and in the
mental attitude that his writings perpetuate.
The talker is, almost of necessity, a dilettante, a
man who delights in, but is not the slave of, his
subject of the moment. The existence of the
dilettante is changeful and playful, resembling
the bee-like, sweet-seeking pilgrimage of the
critic, but quite distinct from it. Conversation
fosters criticism and dilettantism alike, and these
are Wilde's most noticeable characteristics. I
have already insisted, perhaps too often, on the
critical attitude of his work. He insisted on
it himself. Much in his poetry and in his tales
is imitative criticism, his dialogues are critical,
the subject of the best of them is " the critic as
artist," and he did not call Dorian Gray a story,
but "an essay on decorative art." I have not
o 209

OSCAR WILDE

insisted on the dilettantism that made even his
multiform criticism a by-product rather than
the object of his life, and allowed it to look for
applause, and to reflect his conversation instead
of letting his conversation borrow from its less
fleeting radiance. Wilde's work is distinguished
from the greatest in this : it is not overheard.

Wilde provides us with the rare spectacle of a
man most of whose powers are those of a spec-
tator, a connoisseur, a man for whom pictures
are painted and books written, the perfect col-
laborator for whom the artist hopes in his heart ;
the spectacle of such a man, delighting in the
delicacies of life no less than in those of art, and
yet able to turn the pleasures of the dilettante
and the amateur into the motives of the artist.
In some ages, when talk has been more highly
valued than in ours, he would have been ready
to let his criticism die in the air : he would have
been content that all who knew him should
credit him with the power of doing wonderful
things if he chose, and with the preference of
touching with the tips of his fingers the baked
and painted figurine over the modelling of it in
cold and sticky clay. Such credit is not to be
had in our time, and he had to take the clay in
his fingers and prove his mastery. Besides, he
had not the money that would have let him live
at ease among blue china, books wonderfully

210

AFTERTHOUGHT

bound, and men and women as strange as the
moods it would have pleased him to induce. If
he had been rich, I think it possible that he
would have been a des Esseintes or a Dorian
Gray, and left nothing but a legend and a poem
or two, and a few curiosities of luxury to find
their way into the sale-rooms.

Wilde preserved, even in those of his writings
that cost him most dearly, a feeling of recreation.
His books are those of a wonderfully gifted and
accomplished man who is an author only in his
moments of leisure. Only one comparison is
possible, and that is with Horace Walpole ; but
Wilde's was infinitely the richer intellect. Wal-
pole is weighted by his distinction. Wilde wears
his like a flower. Walpole is without breadth,
or depth, and equals only as a gossip Wilde's
enchanting freedom as a juggler with ideas.
Wilde was indolent and knew it. Indolence
was, perhaps, the only sin that stared him in
the face as he lay dying, for it was the only one
that he had committed with a bad conscience. It
had lessened his achievement, and left its marks
on what he had done. Even in his best work he
is sometimes ready to secure an effect too easily.
" Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Brown-
ing," may be regarded as an example of such
effects. Much of his work fails ; much of it has
faded, but Intentions, The Sphinx, The Ballad of

211

OSCAR WILDE

Reading Gaol, Salome, The Importance of Being
Earnest, one or two of the fairy tales, and De
Profundis, are surely enough with which to
challenge the attention of posterity.

These things were the toys of a critical spirit,
of a critic as artist, of a critic who took up first
one and then another form of art, and played
with it almost idly, one and then another form
of thought, and gave it wings for the pleasure of
seeing it in the light ; of a man of action with
the eyes of a child ; of a man of contemplation
curious of all the secrets of life, not only of those
that serve an end ; of a virtuoso with a dis-
taste for the obvious and a delight in disguising
subtlety behind a mask of the very obvious that
he disliked. His love for the delicate and the
rare brought him into the power of things that
are vulgar and coarse. His attempt to weave
his life as a tapestry clothed him in a soiled and
unbeautiful reality. Even this he was able to
subdue. Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. He
touched nothing that he did not decorate.
He touched nothing that he did not turn into
a decoration.

I do not care to prophesy which in particular
of these decorations, of these friezes and tapes-
tries of vision and thought, will enjoy that
prolongation of life, insignificant in the eternal
progress of time, which, for us, seems immor-

212

AFTERTHOUGHT

tality. Art is, perhaps, our only method of
putting oft* death's victory, but what does it
matter to us if the books that feed the intellec-
tual life of our generation are stones to the next
and manna to the generation after that? Of this,
at least, we may be sure : whether remembered
or no, the works that move us now will have an
echo that cannot be denied them, unheard but
still disturbing, or, perhaps, carefully listened
for and picked out, among the myriad roaring
of posterity along the furthest and least imagin-
able corridors of time.

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

Unifomn with this Volume.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

A CRITICAL STUDY

BY

ARTHUR RANSOME

" This very interesting study." TIMES.

"This book describes Poe's sad and extremely lonely
life, with all its pride and morbidness, and it also gives
a subtle and clear analysis of his brilliant gifts."

STANDARD.

" Mr. Arthur Ransome has given us a workmanlike and
readable book." CHRONICLE.

"The study is thorough and conscientious, and as
entertaining as a whole as it is in parts provocative."

SATURDAY REVIEW.

" Always interesting, often ingenious, sometimes bril-
liantly written." NATION.

" Prefaced with a biographical account which is quite
one of the best sketches of Poe's oddly vagabond life
that we have in English." PALL MALL GAZETTE.

" It is possible that the grace and charm of Mr. Ran-
some's style may deceive some as to the serious import of
his work ; but it seems clear to us that in his critical study
of Poe, Mr. Ransome has made a potent but mysterious
person much more truthfully visible than before ; and, in
the larger matters, has shown himself one of the present
timers most vital and original writers on philosophic
criticism, one in whom the right instincts are mated with
an enthusiastic and careful precision of analysis."

LIVERPOOL COURIER.

Uniform with this Volume.

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK

A CRITICAL STUDY

BY

A. MARTIN FREEMAN

" Mr. Freeman's study will be eagerly welcomed. He
deals with all Peacock's known writings, giving analy-
sis of each ; and he writes with a freshness, a searching
clearness and thoroughness delightful in these days of so
much slovenly, slipshod criticism. He sends one to
Peacock, and thereby does the best service a critic of
Peacock can do." EVENING STANDARD.

" It is distinguished and critical, and captures the atmo-
sphere of Peacock." OBSERVER.

" We recommend it to Peacockians, and also to those
who would become such ; it reveals him better than any
anthology could. . . . The book contains biography and
criticism in a manner quite sufficient to equip the casual
reader with a knowledge of the man and his books."

WORLD.

" Mr. Freeman's monograph recounts all that is known
about the circumstances of Peacock's career, and it con-
tains also a good deal of acute criticism of his writings.
It gives us many clues to interpretation, and helps us to
understand the whimsical characteristics of a man who
had a magic pen, and who was nothing if not original."

STANDARD.

PR 5823 .R3 1912 SMC
Ransome, Arthur,
Oscar Wilde 47080967